The smell followed them out of the Academy.
Lin Yue noticed it the moment the transfer light finished fading — chalk dust and old paper, faint but stubborn, clinging to the collar of his coat like it had no intention of being left behind in a dissolving courtyard. He hadn't expected that. Six weeks of a place should have stayed in that place. Instead it had come home with them, small and quiet, the way the worst things always did.
The Game Hall, by contrast, smelled like nothing at all. Floor polish. Recycled air. The faint ozone tang of a hundred transfer pads cycling somewhere out of sight.
It should have felt clean.
It felt, instead, like a room that had never once had to remember anyone.
"You're staring at the floor again," Shen Rui said, sliding up beside him with his hands in his pockets and an expression that hadn't fully decided whether it wanted to be light or careful. "Floor's still real, by the way. Checked twice this time. Very thorough."
"I believe you."
