The first thing that felt unusual was the sound.
It wasn't just one person who heard it, but many at the same time.
After the bell rang, an eerie silence fell over the east corridor on the third floor — so quiet that you could hear footsteps. Several students passing by a locked, old classroom stopped in unison.
"Did you hear something just now?"
"Hear what?"
"Like someone whispering."
Or someone crying?"
The sound wasn't loud, yet it clung to their eardrums, inescapable.
Some grew restless; others covered their ears. Still others, unable to make out the words, felt an instinctive dread. It was as if the air itself had stirred, causing the temperature to drop unnaturally.
The seal was weakening.
Li happened to be passing by at that moment.
He had taken this route before, but just like the previous days, the path had shifted slightly at a turn. His head felt slightly swollen, yet his footsteps didn't falter.
The closer he got to the classroom, the worse his headache became.
It wasn't a sharp pain, but rather a low-frequency vibration, as if something inside him was resonating.
He frowned.
The instant he stepped into the centre of the hallway—
— all sound ceased.
The crying vanished, the whispers stopped abruptly, and even the sticky discomfort clinging to his skin was suppressed. The restless spirits, their emotions choked as if by a stranglehold, were plunged into an eerie, sudden silence.
The students froze in place.
'Was that just now?'
'Gone?'
Some breathed sighs of relief, while others became even more fearful. This silence felt unsafe; it was as if something had been suppressed.
Li stood rooted to the spot, breathing unevenly.
He hadn't done anything.
He had merely stood there.
Yet the ancient rune inscribed on the old classroom door trembled faintly. As if sensing an irresistible pressure, it entered a state of forced 'dormancy' without breaking the seal.
Seconds later, Li's headache intensified sharply.
He staggered and braced himself against the wall, muttering under his breath, 'Damn it.'
He took a step back and, only then, did the air in the corridor slowly resume flowing. The voices ceased. The seal stabilised once more, as if everything that had just occurred was nothing more than a collective hallucination.
Teachers arrived swiftly, evacuating the students and cordoning off the area.
The incident was classified as—
Collective Stress-Induced Auditory Hallucination.
The Night Division personnel watched the transmitted data in silence in the surveillance blind spot.
'Emotional fluctuations... completely flattened.'
'Not dispelled nor purified.'
'More like an innate suppression field.'
They pulled up the footage and froze the frame.
In the frame, Li was leaning against the wall, looking pale and like an ordinary student with a headache.
But the spirit entities' reactions did not lie.
One of them murmured:
'The moment he appeared, the spirit entities chose silence.'
Not annihilated,
but too afraid to continue existing.
That night, Mio was jolted awake by a tremor in her dream.
Not an image, but an emotion.
Fear, chaos and a violently suppressed uprising crashed like waves against the edges of her consciousness. She understood almost instantly.
Something had gone wrong in reality.
And he was right there.
Deep within the dreamscape, a new trace quietly emerged in the blank expanse — not an image, but an intense sense of presence.
Mio stood there, her fingertips slightly cool.
For the first time, she grasped something with crystal clarity:
Li hadn't passively been swept into the anomaly.
He was at the heart of it.
And the world had begun to notice.
Mio knew one thing for certain.
Dreams would be purged.
Not immediately and not entirely, but once they were deemed an 'abnormal intervention', traces would vanish as if they had never existed. She had witnessed this process too many times.
So, when she found herself once more in that familiar yet slightly unstable classroom, her first instinct was not to leave anything behind, but to establish the boundaries.
The blackboard was blank.
There was no view beyond the window.
Time hung suspended at an indeterminate point.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
She couldn't use 'information'.
Not words, not complete images, not anything that could be interpreted as guidance.
It would be erased instantly.
She walked to the desk.
In her dream, the desk had had no number and no owner — just an 'object that could exist'. She extended her finger and pressed her fingertip hard against the wooden surface.
No sound.
Yet the faintest of scratches appeared. Not letters, but irregular marks. These marks were chaotic in direction, but viewed at a certain angle, they vaguely formed the shape of a circuit.
She paused for a second.
This wasn't something she had planned ahead of time.
She was simply following an instinctive path that had been laid out for her.
If Li came here, he wouldn't need to 'understand'.
All she needed to do was sense that someone had been there.
Then she looked up at the clock on the back wall of the classroom.
Both hands moved, but they were a beat behind.
Mio reached out and nudged them gently.
She didn't stop them, she merely shifted them out of sync.
Time still flowed, but no longer perfectly in sync.
This was the limit of what she could do.
She wasn't disrupting the structure, just creating a subtle inconsistency.
Mio took a step back and surveyed the entire space.
Nothing conspicuous had changed.
Even a system check would only register it as a 'natural deviation within the dreamscape'.
Suddenly, she felt like laughing.
She was being so careful yet taking such a risk.
The dreamscape began to show signs of rejection; its edges trembled faintly as if to warn her that it was time to leave. Mio didn't linger. Just before exiting, she murmured softly:
'If you can see this.'
She didn't finish the sentence,
because she didn't know if Li could see it.
She didn't know if he would come here.
And she certainly didn't know how long these traces would last.
But she did it anyway.
When she woke up, the sky was just beginning to lighten.
Mio sat on the bed, her heart beating faster than usual. She raised her hand and looked at her fingertips — there was nothing there, yet they ached faintly.
This was the first time.
For the first time, she chose to place her bet, knowing full well that she would be erased and tracked and that she would leave risks behind.
She wasn't betting on the rules.
She was betting on Li.