I Was Marked By The System's Arbiter

Chapter 121: Chapter 121: The Hand That Writes Tomorrow

There was a bowl of congee at Ning Yue’s place at breakfast.

Lin Yue noticed it before he noticed anything else that morning — before the gray light through the dining hall windows, before Auntie Rong’s usual quiet movement between tables, before the empty chair itself. The bowl sat exactly where it always had, centered on the tray, a spoon resting against the rim at the same careless angle Ning Yue always left hers.

Steam still rose off it.

He stood there a moment longer than he meant to, looking at it.

"Who put that there?" he asked, to no one in particular.

Nobody answered right away. Tang Li, two seats down, looked up from her own tray with the particular slowness of someone who had heard the question a half-second late, as if it had taken that long to travel from his mouth to her understanding.

"I don’t know," she said. "I thought someone else did."

"I didn’t," Lu Fan said, not looking at the bowl. He was looking, very deliberately, at the wall. He had been doing that since they’d sat down — angling himself so that no window fell within his direct line of sight, choosing his seat and his posture the way a man chooses which side of a road to walk on after a car has already hit someone he knew.

"I didn’t either," said Xin Yu, small and pale beside Gao Lin.

Shen Rui, usually the first to fill any silence with something, said nothing at all. He sat with his own tray mostly untouched, turning his chopsticks over once, twice, in his fingers, and did not offer a joke to lighten the moment the way he would have two days ago.

Lin Yue crossed the hall and touched two fingers briefly to the side of the bowl.

Warm. Not lukewarm the way food left over a while would be. Warm the way food was when it had just been ladled.

He straightened up.

"Nobody made it," he said. "Nobody carried it here. And it’s fresh."

"So who—" Tang Li started, then stopped herself, because there was no good way to finish that question without leading somewhere none of them wanted to go this early in the morning.

Su Qing was the one who properly broke the silence. She had her notebook already open on the table beside her tray — she’d had it open since she sat down, Lin Yue realized, going back through what looked like several pages of yesterday’s notes, her eyes moving fast and precise, comparing something against something.

"The kitchen staff never come out this early," she said, without looking up. "I checked yesterday. Six-forty is the earliest anyone’s seen them at the serving window. It’s six-fifteen now."

"Maybe the routine changed," Mo Jun offered mildly, buttering a piece of bread with the same unhurried calm he’d shown since the first week. "Places like this run on habit more than logic."

"Maybe," Su Qing said. She didn’t sound convinced. She closed her notebook, then opened it again almost immediately, flipping back two pages to reread something she had clearly already read once this morning.

He Yuan hadn’t said anything at all.

Lin Yue looked at him properly for the first time since they’d sat down. He Yuan sat with his back straight, both hands wrapped around a cup of tea he wasn’t drinking, and his eyes moved slowly around the room — the door, the windows, the serving counter, the other players, the empty bowl — with a kind of methodical attention that hadn’t been there a week ago. No tears. No shaking. Just a young man who had apparently decided, sometime in the last eight hours, that watching was safer than feeling.

"He Yuan," Lin Yue said quietly. "You don’t have to sit with us this morning, if you’d rather not."

"I’d rather sit here," He Yuan said. His voice was even. Too even. "I want to see what happens next."

Nobody argued with that.

Bai Wuyin sat pressed close to Lin Yue’s side, sketchbook hugged to his chest, shoulders drawn in small and tight the way they always were in front of the others. When Auntie Rong passed near their table, he flinched — a small, convincing flinch, timed exactly a half-second after her shadow crossed him, and Lin Yue, watching from the corner of his eye, thought, not for the first time, that Bai Wuyin performed fear the way a musician performs a piece he has played so many times he no longer needs to think about the notes.

Nobody moved Ning Yue’s bowl.

By the time breakfast ended, it still sat there, cooling at last, spoon undisturbed, a small warm wrongness in the middle of an ordinary room.

Ning Yue’s notebook sat on the table by Lin Yue’s own plate. He Yuan had brought it down with him — he hadn’t said why, and Lin Yue hadn’t asked. It felt like something a person needed to carry without being questioned about it.

Lin Yue had already read the last entry twice.

Third-Floor Corridor. Seventh window blank again this morning. He Yuan says it’s been three days. I count two. Will confirm with Su Qing’s notes tonight.

The reflection in the sixth window blinked before I did. I need to stop looking at it and start writing down when instead.

That was all. The final line, in Ning Yue’s small, careful handwriting, ended mid-thought — a habit of hers, he remembered now, watching her write these last two days. She’d trail off mid-sentence sometimes when something occurred to her faster than her pen could follow, then circle back later to finish it.

She had never circled back to this one.

The page was otherwise blank. No smearing. No later hand finishing the sentence for her, the way the chalkboards did. No date pushed forward, no new entry appearing where none should be.

It should have been a relief, Lin Yue thought. The notebook was exactly what it should be — untouched, unaltered, hers.

That was precisely what disturbed him.

If the woman is gone and the record is still here, he thought, turning the closed notebook over once in his hands, which one does this place actually think is real?

He didn’t have an answer. He put the notebook down and didn’t touch it again.

Lin Xia found them just as the last of the group was clearing their trays.

She didn’t announce herself. Lin Yue only noticed her because Bai Wuyin’s hand tightened, briefly, on his sleeve — not dramatically, just enough that Lin Yue turned his head and found the girl already standing at the end of their table, hands folded in front of her, waiting with the patience of someone who had been there for some time and simply hadn’t bothered to interrupt.

She was holding a book. A slim, unremarkable thing with a cracked spine, tucked against her chest the way Bai Wuyin held his sketchbook.

"Good morning," she said.

Nobody answered right away. Su Qing looked up first, wary. Shen Rui set his chopsticks down.

"I need to return this," Lin Xia said, as if that explained everything, and held the book out a fraction of an inch, as though offering it to the table in general.

"We didn’t borrow anything from you," Tang Li said slowly.

Lin Xia’s gaze moved across the table, unhurried, and settled — for just a moment — somewhere that wasn’t quite any of them.

"Not you," she said.

The silence that followed had weight to it. Lin Yue felt it settle over the table the way the cold in the third-floor corridor had settled over them the night before — not sudden, just suddenly noticed.

"Then who?" Lin Yue asked.

Lin Xia looked at him. Her expression didn’t change, exactly, but something in it sharpened — the way a person’s face sharpens when a question finally lands somewhere they were waiting for it to land.

"The library has a record of it being borrowed," she said. "It doesn’t say by whom. It just says it hasn’t come back."

"That’s not an answer," Su Qing said.

"No," Lin Xia agreed. "It isn’t."

She turned, book still held against her chest, and began walking toward the doors without waiting to see if they’d follow.

"If you don’t return it," she said, over her shoulder, in a tone so ordinary it took Lin Yue a second to register how wrong the sentence was, "they’ll think you’re still using it."

"Who is they?" Lin Yue asked.

She didn’t answer that either. She simply kept walking, unhurried, toward the Old Library, and after a long beat of looking at each other, the group got up and followed.

The library was different this time.

Lin Yue noticed it the moment they crossed the threshold. Their first visit here — the night the shelf had held a book with his own misspelled name on the spine — the place had felt chaotic in a way that suggested danger: books rearranged overnight, shelves that shouldn’t have existed, a sense of a room actively working against them.

This time it felt organized.

Too organized.

The books stood in perfectly even rows, spines flush, no gaps, no dust settled unevenly the way it should on shelves this old. The deeper Lin Xia led them, the fewer actual books there seemed to be — shelf after shelf of spines with no titles at all, dark covers standing in silent ranks like soldiers at inspection.

"This section wasn’t here before," Ye Xian said quietly, running two fingers along one shelf without touching the books themselves.

"It was," Lin Xia said. "You just didn’t need to see it before."

She stopped at a section of shelving that looked, to Lin Yue’s eye, exactly like every other section they’d passed — ordinary, unmarked, no different from the ten shelves before it. Lin Xia reached up and pressed one spine inward, firm and precise, like someone repeating a motion she’d made a hundred times.

Something clicked, deep inside the wall.

A narrow section of shelving shifted — not swinging open dramatically, just sliding, a few inches, revealing a gap barely wide enough for one person to pass through sideways.

Behind it: a cramped alcove, no larger than a closet, and inside the alcove, arranged on a single low shelf, sat six notebooks.

They looked almost ordinary. Dark covers. No titles. No names stamped anywhere on them. If Lin Yue had found even one of them lying on a desk in any of the eight classrooms, he wouldn’t have looked at it twice.

That was what made all six of them together so wrong.

"Six," Bai Wuyin said, very quietly, and Lin Yue saw him do the thing he always did in front of the others — small shoulders curling in, sketchbook rising to shield his chest, his voice pitched thin and frightened. "Why six?"

"I don’t know," Lin Xia said, which was, Lin Yue was beginning to notice, the answer she gave more often than any other.

Su Qing was already crouched at the alcove’s threshold, reaching for the nearest notebook with the careful, deliberate motion of someone handling evidence.

"They’re not dusty," she said.

Lin Yue looked. She was right. Every other surface in this library carried at least a film of age, even where the shelves themselves had been rearranged. These six notebooks sat clean, their covers faintly worn at the corners the way objects wear when hands return to them again and again.

Su Qing turned the top one over in her palms. On the back cover, faint but unmistakable in the alcove’s dim light, was the pale ghost of a handprint — not dust disturbed by a recent touch, but an actual indentation pressed into the material itself, like a signature nobody had meant to leave.

"Somebody’s still using these," she said.

They carried all six out into the main reading room, where the light was better, and spread them across one long table.

For a while, nobody spoke. They simply read.

The first entries, in every notebook, were almost disappointingly normal. Complaints about a mathematics lesson. A description of rain on a particular Tuesday. A short, irritated paragraph about a roommate who wouldn’t stop humming during study hours. A list of teachers’ names, several of which meant nothing to any of them — Mr. Xu appeared once, but so did names none of the group recognized at all.

"This is just... a diary," Shen Rui said, flipping a page. "A boring one."

"Keep reading," Lin Xia said, from where she stood near the alcove entrance, arms folded, watching them without offering to help.

Lin Yue kept reading.

The entries changed gradually. A few pages in, one writer noted, almost in passing, that Classroom 1-04 doesn’t have a back door anymore. I’m sure it used to. Further on, in a different notebook, in a rounder, younger hand: Someone’s missing from our row. I keep counting and getting eleven instead of twelve. Nobody else seems to notice.

Another: Why does nobody remember Wei Chen practicing at night? I hear the ball every evening. I asked three people today. None of them have heard it once.

Another, the handwriting tighter, more controlled, as though the writer had been trying very hard to stay calm: I heard chalk again after lights out. I didn’t look. I’m not going to look. I’m just going to write this down so that when I forget I heard it, there’s proof that I did.

Tang Li had gone very quiet beside him, turning pages slowly.

"These aren’t horror stories," Lu Fan said, low. "They’re just... normal kids. Writing normal things. And then—"

"And then it stops being normal," Su Qing finished, "a little bit at a time. Until it isn’t."

Lin Yue looked up at Lin Xia. She hadn’t moved from the alcove entrance. She watched them read the way a teacher watches students take an exam she already knows the answer to.

"Whose are these?" he asked.

"Students," Lin Xia said.

"That’s not an answer either."

Something that might have been the start of a smile crossed her face and vanished before it fully formed. "No," she agreed. "It isn’t."

It was Su Qing who found the damage.

She had been working through the third notebook methodically, running her fingers along the inner margin of every page the way she did when she was checking for something specific rather than simply reading. Partway through, her hand stopped.

"This page is cut," she said.

The others gathered around. She held the notebook open at the spine, and there — flush against the binding, almost invisible unless you were looking for it — was a narrow strip of paper where a page should have been. Not torn. Not ragged the way paper tears when pulled by hand. A clean, straight edge, cut close enough to the spine that whoever had done it had wanted the gap to be difficult to notice.

"Coincidence," Shen Rui said, without much conviction.

Su Qing was already reaching for the second notebook.

She found the same thing. A narrow strip against the spine. A missing page.

She checked the third notebook. The fourth. Her movements grew faster, more precise, her earlier caution giving way to something closer to urgency, and by the time she reached the sixth, Lin Yue already knew, from the set of her shoulders, what she was going to say before she said it.

"All six," she said. "Every single one. A page is missing."

She laid two of the notebooks side by side and pressed the cut edges together, aligning them under the reading room’s dim light.

"Look."

Lin Yue leaned in. The cuts matched. Not roughly — exactly. The same angle, tilted very slightly from true vertical. The same depth into the binding. The same faint, near-invisible unevenness along the blade’s path, the kind of imperfection that would be different for every different blade, every different hand, unless the same blade and the same hand had made every single cut.

"They didn’t lose the pages," Su Qing said.

Lin Yue looked at her.

"They removed them," he said.

"Why?" Tang Li asked.

Su Qing turned the third notebook sideways, studying the cut edge again, as if the angle itself might answer if she looked at it from enough directions.

"Because they knew exactly which page they wanted," she said. "You don’t cut six notebooks at the same spot by accident. You do it because you already know what’s written there, and you don’t want anyone else to."

Bai Wuyin, still pressed close to Lin Yue’s side, made a small, frightened sound and clutched his sketchbook tighter — the picture of a scared child taking in one more horrible thing. Lin Yue felt his hand, hidden against the sketchbook’s edge where only Lin Yue could see it, tap once against the cover.

Later, the tap said. Not here.

Lin Yue said nothing, and let the moment pass.

Su Qing, meanwhile, had pulled her own notebook from her bag and begun cross-referencing what she’d found against her earlier notes — checking, then checking again, flipping back several pages to a passage she’d apparently written yesterday, comparing the words against what she remembered writing.

"Su Qing," Mo Jun said gently. "You’ve read that page three times."

"I know," she said, not looking up. "I want to make sure it still says what I remember it saying."

Nobody had a response to that. Lin Yue watched her a moment longer — watched the particular, careful way she held her own notebook now, as if it might shift under her hand if she looked away too long — and thought, with a discomfort he didn’t voice, that whatever this place had done to Ning Yue with mirrors, it might be doing something slower and quieter to Su Qing with memory itself.

Tang Li found the handwriting a few minutes later.

She had been working through the fifth notebook in silence, and Lin Yue noticed her stillness before he noticed anything she said — the particular stillness of someone who has stopped turning pages not because they’ve finished reading, but because they can’t make themselves move.

"Tang Li?"

She didn’t answer at first. She held the notebook out slightly, angling it so the entry caught the light better, staring at it the way a person stares at their own face in a mirror that’s showing them something wrong.

"This is my handwriting," she said.

"You wrote in it?" Lu Fan asked, leaning over her shoulder.

"No." Her voice was very quiet. "I mean — this is my handwriting. Not similar to mine. Mine."

Lin Yue looked. To his eye it was simply neat, cursive-leaning script, nothing that stood out from any other entry in any of the six notebooks. But Tang Li was already pointing — the way the crossbar on her t’s slanted downward instead of straight across, a habit she’d clearly had long enough that she didn’t think about it anymore. The particular pressure at the start of each word, heavier than the rest, the way someone presses down out of habit before their hand settles into the rhythm of writing. A correction mark — not a crossed-out word, but a specific small loop she used to indicate she wanted to go back and revise a line later.

"I do that," she said, touching the loop with one finger, not quite daring to touch the page itself. "I’ve always done that. Nobody else does it like that. I checked once, years ago, because a teacher asked whose mark it was on a group assignment, and none of the others in my class made it the same way."

"Maybe someone copied it," Shen Rui offered, though he didn’t sound like he believed it himself.

"Look at the date," Su Qing said.

Tang Li looked. Lin Yue looked with her.

The entry was dated to a lesson listed on the academy’s posted schedule — a schedule they had all seen, all memorized in the way you memorize anything that might matter later. A lesson three days from now.

"That hasn’t happened," Tang Li said. "I haven’t been to that lesson. I haven’t been anywhere near that classroom."

"When is this?" Lin Yue asked, already knowing, needing to hear her say it anyway.

She told him the date.

He didn’t need to check the schedule to know she was right. None of them did. They had all checked it enough times in the last week that the dates sat in their heads the way exam dates sit in a student’s head the week before finals — unwelcome, but impossible to forget.

"I haven’t been there," Tang Li said again, quieter this time. And then, after a pause long enough that Lin Yue watched the understanding finish arriving in her face:

"But I wrote this."

Nobody said anything.

She closed the notebook slowly, both hands flat on the cover, the way you might close a door on something you didn’t want to look at directly for a moment longer.

Lin Yue turned to Lin Xia.

"Who are these students?" he asked again, and this time there was an edge in his voice he didn’t bother softening.

Lin Xia looked at the six notebooks laid out across the table, at Tang Li’s white knuckles against the cover of the fifth one, at Su Qing still cross-referencing her own handwriting against itself.

"Students," she said.

"They’re dead?"

She didn’t answer right away. When she did, it came slow, careful, like she was choosing the word deliberately rather than avoiding the question.

"Some of them."

"What happened to the missing pages?"

For a long moment, Lin Xia said nothing at all. Her eyes moved once, briefly, toward the alcove behind her, as if checking that nothing had followed them out of it.

"They wrote until they couldn’t," she said finally. "Then someone else finished the sentence."

The words sat in the room for a while before anyone tried to do anything with them.

"That doesn’t mean the pages are gone," Lin Yue said slowly, working through it out loud the way he always did when a shape was starting to form, and he hadn’t finished seeing all its edges yet. "It means the writing continued. Just not by the same hand."

"So the handwriting after the cut," Su Qing said, catching up to him, "might not belong to the student at all."

"It might belong to whoever finished the sentence," Lin Yue said.

Bai Wuyin, still curled small against his side, made another soft, frightened sound — a good performance, timed well, the kind that would have fooled anyone in the room who wasn’t specifically watching for the difference between Bai Wuyin’s fear and Bai Wuyin’s attention. Lin Yue, watching, saw both. The fear was for the others. The attention — sharp, still, entirely unblinking behind it — was for him.

"Did you know these pages were missing?" Lin Yue asked Lin Xia.

"Yes."

"Did you remove them?"

A pause. Longer this time.

"I helped."

The reading room went very quiet.

"Helped who?" Lin Yue asked.

Lin Xia looked at the six notebooks again, not at him.

"I don’t remember," she said.

"You don’t know," Su Qing said, "or you don’t remember?"

Lin Xia’s eyes came up, and for just a second something moved behind them that hadn’t been there in any of their previous conversations with her — not confusion exactly, but the particular strain of someone reaching for a memory and finding the space where it should be simply empty, worn smooth, like a groove in stone that had once held something and no longer did.

"I don’t remember," she said again, more carefully this time, as though she understood, finally, that the distinction mattered. "I know I helped. I don’t know who I helped, or why. I’ve tried to remember it before. It isn’t there to find."

"Then why did you help?" Lin Yue asked. "If you don’t remember who asked you to, or why—"

"I don’t remember that either," Lin Xia said.

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, it came out smaller than anything she’d said to them so far — not performed, not rehearsed the way so much of what she said sounded rehearsed. Just quiet.

"But I remember being afraid not to."

Nobody spoke.

Lin Yue watched her carefully, filing that sentence away with the same attention he gave to everything else in this place that didn’t quite line up — not writing it down, not yet, just holding it somewhere he could return to it. I don’t remember was not the same claim as I don’t know. It implied there had been something to remember in the first place. It implied a memory that had been taken from her rather than one she had simply never possessed.

"Lin Xia," he said, gentler now. "Is your memory being changed? The way ours might be?"

She looked at him for a long moment.

"I don’t know," she said. "That’s the part I actually don’t know."

They were still standing around the table, the six notebooks spread open, when Su Qing pulled something else from her bag — the folded riddle sheet from her own textbook, the one none of them had ever fully explained, the eight lines that had turned out to describe victims instead of places.

"Wait," she said. "Let me check something."

She unfolded it flat and laid the sheet’s cut edge — the fold, sharp and deliberate, where the paper had clearly been sliced free of a larger sheet rather than simply torn from a notebook — against the cut edge of the nearest missing-page notebook.

The angle matched.

The depth matched.

The same faint, near-invisible imperfection ran along both edges, identical in a way that left no real room for coincidence.

"Same blade," Su Qing said quietly. "Same hand."

Lin Yue looked at the two edges pressed together and felt something settle into place that he didn’t like the shape of at all.

"The riddle wasn’t just given to us," he said slowly. "It was assembled. From the same material as this." He nodded at the notebooks. "Whoever cut these pages out also cut the riddle sheets that were waiting in our textbooks before we ever arrived."

"Which means," Su Qing said, "someone had access to all of this — the students, their records, whatever these pages actually say — before we ever walked in the door."

Nobody offered a comfortable explanation for that. Lin Yue looked at Lin Xia, but she only looked back at him with the same careful, worn blankness she’d shown all morning, and said nothing at all, which he was beginning to understand was its own kind of answer.

They were gathering the notebooks — carefully, Su Qing insisting on noting the order they’d been found in before anyone closed a single cover — when the pressure came.

Lin Yue felt it first as a faint metallic weight behind his eyes, the same sensation that always preceded a System notice, building slowly rather than announcing itself all at once. Around him, he saw the others go still one by one as they felt it too — Shen Rui’s shoulders tensing, Tang Li’s hand tightening on the notebook she still held.

Then the blue text unfurled, unhurried, across all their vision at once.

[RULE UPDATE.]

[RULE 05 — NEVER SLEEP BEFORE ATTENDANCE.]

A pause, long enough that Lin Yue thought it might be finished.

[ATTENDANCE IS NOT A FORMALITY.]

Another pause.

[SOME STUDENTS ARE ONLY PRESENT WHILE ASLEEP.]

The last line held for a moment, then dissolved before any of them could finish reading it a second time, the way the chalk always smeared the instant someone tried to hold onto it too long.

"What does that mean?" Xin Yu asked, voice small.

"It means," Lin Yue said, "that sleep isn’t just rest here. It’s a state something else needs us to be in."

"What happens if we sleep?" Tang Li asked.

Lin Yue considered lying, briefly, out of some old instinct to keep people calm. He decided against it.

"We’ll find out why the rule exists," he said honestly.

Shen Rui made a face. "I’d rather not."

"Neither would I," Lin Yue said.

That, at least, drew the faintest ghost of a laugh from Su Qing — brief, humorless, but real. It was the first sound close to lightness any of them had made since Ning Yue’s death, and it didn’t last long enough to feel like relief.

They packed the six notebooks carefully into Su Qing’s bag before leaving the alcove — all six, minus their missing pages, which remained, for now, exactly as lost as they had been an hour ago.

Lin Xia watched them go without offering to walk them out.

"Lin Xia," Lin Yue said, pausing at the shelf’s narrow gap. "The missing pages. Are they still in the academy?"

"Somewhere," she said.

"Where?"

She looked at him for a long moment, and something in her face — not quite a smile, not quite anything Lin Yue had a name for — made him think, not for the first time, that she genuinely wished she could give him a better answer than the one she had.

"I don’t remember," she said. "But I don’t think they’re finished being written yet."

That was the last thing she said to them before the shelf slid shut behind her, sealing the alcove away as neatly as it had opened, leaving no seam behind to prove it had ever been there at all.

It was evening by the time Tang Li opened the notebook again.

She’d taken it — with Su Qing’s reluctant permission, and only after Su Qing had copied every entry into her own notes twice, checking the copies against each other before she trusted either — to a quiet corner of the dormitory common room, away from the others, and sat with it closed in her lap for a long while before she finally opened it.

The date hadn’t changed. She checked it twice to be sure, then closed the notebook and went to dinner with the rest of them, saying nothing.

She opened it again after dinner, in the last hour before curfew, when the common room had emptied out, and the only sound left in the building was the faint electrical hum behind the walls that never seemed to stop.

The date had changed.

It read, now, in the same handwriting Su Qing had confirmed page by page was unmistakably hers: Tomorrow.

Not a calendar date. Not a lesson time. Just that single word, sitting where a date should sit, written with the same small downward slant on the crossbar of the t that had convinced her, this morning, that the earlier entry had genuinely been her own hand.

She turned the page.

The entry beneath it was new. She didn’t remember writing it. She was certain, with the same cold certainty she’d felt over the earlier entry, that she hadn’t.

Attendance begins before the teacher arrives.

Tang Li stared at the line for a long moment, feeling something go very still and very cold behind her ribs.

Then, while she watched — the ink simply appearing, stroke by stroke, with no hand visible to draw it — another line began to form beneath the first, in her own unmistakable handwriting.

Don’t sleep.

The pen stopped there. No further words came. The notebook simply sat open in her lap, the wet gleam of the last stroke still catching the room’s dim light, and Tang Li’s hands began, very slightly, to shake.

She dropped the notebook.

It landed open on the floor, that single warning still visible on the page, and it was the small, flat sound of it hitting the tile that finally made Lin Yue turn his head from across the room.

"Tang Li?"

She didn’t answer.

He crossed the room quickly, Bai Wuyin trailing a half-step behind him, and crouched to pick the notebook up from where it had fallen. Tang Li didn’t stop him. She only turned it toward him with one trembling hand, as if she needed someone else to confirm that what she’d seen was actually there.

Lin Yue read it once.

Attendance begins before the teacher arrives.

Don’t sleep.

He looked up at her.

"When did you write this?"

"I didn’t," Tang Li said, and her voice, when it finally came, was barely above a whisper. "I watched it happen. Just now. In my own handwriting."

Behind them, through the common room’s single window, the corridor outside had gone very quiet — the particular, listening quiet Lin Yue had started to recognize as this academy’s way of holding its breath.

He didn’t say anything about that. He closed the notebook carefully, keeping one finger between the pages to hold the place, and did not, for the moment, tell Tang Li what he was already beginning to suspect.

That somewhere in this building, tomorrow had already been written down.

And she was the one writing it.

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