The third tap didn't come.
The lane held its breath. The faulty bell ticked—late, hollow, a sound with soft edges that could not cut. Qin Ye and Lin Xiu moved anyway, steps locking in a private sub-cadence that ignored the broken rhythm. Two taps had been the signal: hold the internal count. Their bodies became a single, flowing instrument, tuned to each other, not to metal.
Rope fibers hummed. Chalk dust floated in a pale sunbeam. The sand timer hissed on the table like a thin fuse burning toward nothing.
They walked the first span in silence. Silent Step muted the impact; Quiet Pivot shaved corners without wasting distance. Lin Xiu's fingers eased from bone-white to ready. The crowd learned how to be quiet without being told.
⸻
As they passed the sand-timer stand, Qin Ye's hand brushed a bolt on its base.
[Daily Sign-In available.]
[Location: Sand-Timer Stand Bolt.]
[Sign-In? Yes / No]
Yes.
[Ding! Sign-In successful!]
[Reward: Pulse Counter (Lv.1, 30 beats — palm-haptic count immune to external drift) + Device Witness Mark (1 use — any touch to lane instruments is auto-logged & announced).]
A steady pulse woke in his palm—haptic and exact, a metronome under the skin. Qin Ye willed the Device Witness Mark into the metronome frame and the boundary post. A faint, official glow threaded the metal—nothing flashy, just a line only clerks and law could love.
The bell ticked again, wrong by a hair. Lin Xiu didn't flinch. Her breath matched the pulse in his hand, an echo without echo.
⸻
Composite Finish.
The last segment of the composite waited—short, simple, merciless. Baton to center. Two turns. A shared halt at the rope mark.
They flowed.
Qin Ye's baton traced a clean line from his hip to the index point in Lin Xiu's palm, landing with the weight of something already remembered. Her return mirrored it, angle perfect, grip legal. Silent Step carried them between cones like ink on polished wood. Each pivot shaved sound from the floor.
Feng watched too closely. When the rope sang at the corner, he reached to "steady" the boundary post—fingertips brushing the metal.
The lane answered him.
A clear, mechanical voice rang from the official's table, crisp and public:
"Contact logged. Lane apparatus touched during active trial."
Every marshal eye snapped to Feng, then to Yue Hong. Pens paused mid-air. A clerk's stamp hovered, then retracted. The note went into a ledger in neat, small characters.
The run did not stop. It wasn't allowed to. Law preferred motion when it had already promised motion.
They finished as the last grain of sand fell, a final hiss and a soft glass ping.
"Time!" the head marshal called, voice level. "Score: tied. Proceed to thirty-breath trial."
A held breath became an exhale, then returned to being a held breath.
⸻
Tie-Breaker.
Qin Ye didn't hesitate. "Clause 6.9. Disputed instruments permit a secondary reference. I request Neutral Bell Mode."
The head clerk nodded once—no surprise; the clause lived on the card—and lifted a small, hand-held brass bell from a velvet-lined case. He set it on the table beside the metronome frame, away from reaching hands. The bell's clear tone would be the official count.
The minor marshal raised a flag—formality only. The major marshal lowered it—permission only. The sand timer was flipped again, not to measure steps, but to give the yard a visible shape for its attention.
Qin Ye activated the Pulse Counter. Thirty steady pulses unfurled into his palm, each a tiny, perfect pressure against the skin. He gave Lin Xiu a single, subtle thigh tap—the signal to follow his hand, not the air.
The clerk lifted the bell and struck once.
The sound was clean. The lane's silence was cleaner.
They stepped on the pulse, not the bell. The bell existed for the judge; the pulse existed for them.
Two steps. Four. Six. The rope to their right blurred into something that had no teeth. The ground underfoot turned into an argument they had already won.
Yue Hong lifted a hand. "Procedural wedge," he said—calm, almost bored. "Their synchronization is too exact to be improvised. Prearranged code beyond tactile allowance."
The head clerk didn't look up. He touched the placard with a fingertip—three dots in a triangle beside a stick outline, sleeve-signal annotated in small script—and said, "Permitted." The clerk rang the bell for the next beat without changing his breathing.
Feng's jaw ticced. Yue Hong's eyes moved to the hand-bell, then to Qin Ye's palm, then to the metronome frame. A calculation without numbers. His heel adjusted a fraction, trying to marry the bell to his step.
The bell rang again.
Qin Ye's body ignored it. He rode the pulse—one, two, three—each landing exact, each breath a 4-4-2 that couldn't be bribed by sound.
Ten beats. Twelve. Fourteen.
The yard learned, reluctantly, how to count without counting.
At the fifteenth beat, the hand-bell's tone met a small echo from the frame behind it. Not a lag. A resonance. Someone had nudged the metronome casing—no touch, just a breath close enough to tremble metal.
The Device Witness Mark did not care about "close enough."
"Proximity alert," the same clear voice announced. "Frame vibration logged during neutral trial."
Eyes dragged toward the assistant standing one pace too near the frame. The assistant flushed, stepped back. The judge's stare flattened into glass. The bell rang on, ruthless in its smallness.
Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one.
Lin Xiu's breath rode beside Qin Ye's in perfect shadow, one ribcage away. She did not look at the bell. She looked at the rope and saw a line that would not move, and believed it.
Twenty-four.
On the far lane, Yue Hong and Feng tried to pin the bell to their bodies. The tone was honest; the shape of it bent around the yard weirdly, meeting ears later than feet expected. A boundary of sound, not rope.
Their twentieth step landed a thread off. The correction came fast—too fast. The twenty-first hit on the metal, not on the leg. Their shoulders shaved the air just wrong.
A clerk's pen drew a short line. No flag. A note.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine.
Qin Ye felt the last two pulses gather in his palm like a knot being tied. He did not tap a third time. He didn't need to. The pulse pulled his foot the way rope pulls a sailboat.
Thirty.
The bell's ring fell into a silence that had already placed its step.
The head marshal did not smile. He did not know how, and it wasn't in the job.
"Trial complete," he said, and the word complete sounded like a stamp. "Victory: Qin Ye and Lin Xiu."
The lane exhaled at last. The crowd discovered it had lungs.
⸻
[Ding! Micro-Goal: "Win on a Wrong Bell."]
[Reward: +250,000 Spirit Stones; Duo Timing +3% (situational).]
[Ding! Paired Application — Round Advance.]
The rewards slid into place with the indifference of good accounting. No flash, just certainty.
Lin Xiu didn't grin. She let her shoulders drop a degree and blinked once, long. Qin Ye gave a minimal nod—approval wrapped as instruction: good; breathe; next.
⸻
The posting board accepted wax and heavy thumb.
Names shifted on the slate like stones rolling into a new pattern.
Semifinal: Qin Ye & Lin Xiu vs. Instructor Mo's trainees. He-line favored, capable in mirror drills, known for precision push-calls and "friendly correction" near ropes. A clerk added a small triangle mark beside their names—a record of prior appeals sustained.
From the gallery, Liu Shan's slate turned a page. He drew three clean characters, each the length of a breath: witness log effective. He added one more, smaller: observe semifinal. His face didn't move, but the angle of his head shifted toward the supply tables, then back to the bell stand, as if he had decided two lines in the air might belong to the same drawing.
Yue Hong watched the posting. For a blink, contempt flickered. Then nothing. He touched Feng's elbow once, the way a man tests a hinge, and left the lane without a word.
⸻
Officials began clearing apparatus, sweeping chalk into tidy piles, coiling the lane ropes by habit. The metronome frame sat open, the swapped bell beside it on felt. The first faulty bell leaned in a tray beneath the stand, its axle cap scuffed.
Qin Ye walked past without slowing. His eyes slid down and logged the tray the way a clerk logs a line.
A tiny, removable micro-weight lay in the dust of metal filings. No bigger than a grain of rice. Its flat side carried a faint vendor stamp in miniature—a broken circle around a chevron.
He had seen that mark before. On a supply crate near the marshal's stand. On the corner, just under a hemp tie, where stamps hide because they can.
The yard continued its business. Law moved on paper. People moved around law. The bell, newly honest, looked smaller than it had ten minutes ago.
[Ding! Side Quest unlocked: "Trace the Hand." — Identify the tamper source before the semifinal. Reward: Evidence Seal + Reputation: Proctors +1.]
The UI faded, leaving the mark in his mind and the weight in the tray as loud as an admission.
Qin Ye did not pick it up. Not yet. Evidence had to be witnessed in the way it wished to be true.
He set his baton across his palms, balanced it, and felt the pulse in his hand slow to ordinary life. The rope beside him creaked as it relaxed to storage tension. A clerk's stamp thudded, final, on the posting.
He let the third tap land—on tomorrow.