The Game Hall had gone back to sounding like itself.
Lin Yue noticed it the way he noticed most things—without announcing it, without needing to. Three days after Yinshan Academy, the corridors had regained their ordinary hum: terminals chiming somewhere out of sight, someone laughing two floors down over a joke Lin Yue would never hear the setup to, a notification blinking red on a wall panel that nobody bothered to check. The Hall did not mourn. It simply filled itself back in, the way water finds the shape of whatever contains it.
Lin Yue ate breakfast alone, as he always did. He watched the room the way he always did. He walked past the Rank Board twice without stopping, which was unusual only in that he made himself not stop, because stopping would have meant thinking about Bai Wuyin's registration date again, and he had promised himself one day without that particular knot in his chest.
He lasted until midmorning.
