The Game Hall never went quiet, but tonight it came closer than Lin Yue had ever heard it.
He lay on his back in the dark with his hands folded on his stomach and listened to it anyway — the ventilation cycling through its patient rhythm somewhere above the ceiling, a terminal chiming two corridors over for someone's small good fortune, a door opening and closing far enough away that it registered only as a change in the air. After the Yinshan Academy settlement, most players had gone straight to their rooms and stayed there. Seven out of twelve did that to a crowd. The Hall thinned, and the sounds that were left carried farther, the way a voice carries farther in an empty room than a full one.
He should have been asleep. He'd been telling himself that for two hours.
Instead his mind kept doing what it always did, which was refuse to leave anything alone.
