Bai Wuyin.
The wood had barely finished breathing out its last curl of shaving before the room went the particular kind of silent that wasn't silence at all — it was thirty-one people not exhaling, all at once, and Lin Yue's own pulse loud enough in his ears to fill the gap where sound should have been.
Nobody moved.
That was the part that would stay with him longer than the carving itself, later, when he had the luxury of picking the moment apart in pieces — that for two, maybe three full seconds, none of them so much as flinched. Not Su Qing, whose hand was still half-raised from the pages she'd been holding a moment ago. Not Shen Rui, caught mid-breath with his jaw locked. Not He Yuan, whose eyes had gone from the desk to Bai Wuyin and stayed there, wide and disbelieving, as if repetition might change what they'd just watched carved into fifty-year-old grain.
Bai Wuyin didn't move either.
