For several seconds, nothing happened.
That was the strangest part, Lin Yue thought — not the silence itself, but how ordinary it felt. No flare of System text. No shriek of wood splitting deeper. No answering cold that crawled up through the floor the way it had every other time the room had disagreed with something a player said. Just thirty-one exam papers, thirty-one pencils gone still, and a question hanging in the air that nobody had answered and nobody was going to.
WHO WILL YOU GIVE?
The words sat there a moment longer. Then, one by one, across all thirty-one desks, they began to fade.
Not scratched out. Not erased by some unseen hand dragging a blade across the page the way the Chalk Child used to undo a sentence it didn't like. They simply thinned, ink losing its hold on the paper the way breath left a window, until there was nothing left where the question had been but blank white and the faint impression of pressure that no longer meant anything.
