Yan Ye stepped through the classroom door and counted the heads that turned.
Twenty-three.
That was more attention than Big Ye had received in a full semester. He catalogued the possibilities as he walked to his seat: the weight loss was visible now after twelve days of training, he'd missed three days of class last week, or there was a piece of gossip circulating that he hadn't caught yet. His legs still ached from the morning run and sitting down felt like a minor reward.
He barely had time to pull out his notebook before a classmate slid into the adjacent seat. Li something. He couldn't remember the family name. The kid leaned in with the body language of someone who had information he found physically impossible to keep inside.
"Bro. Is it true you went on a date with Ms. Wen?"
Ah. So that's why they were looking at me.
The source was obvious. Only one person had seen them together at the commercial district last week, and that person had the approximate emotional maturity of a wet napkin. The fact that it had taken Wei Hao this long to spread it meant he'd been waiting for something first, probably hoping the vice-principal would deliver a punishment that never came.
Disappointing, wasn't it?
"Where'd you hear that?" Yan Ye asked, his voice carrying exactly nothing.
"Everyone's talking about it."
"Everyone's talking about a student and a teacher going to the same commercial district. On a Saturday. In a city of five million people." He opened his notebook. "That's a slow news week."
Li-something blinked, processing whether he'd just been shut down. Yan Ye didn't help him figure it out. The kid retreated to his own seat with the slightly deflated energy of someone whose premium gossip had failed to produce the expected reaction.
His gaze drifted to the third row near the window. Wei Hao was already looking at him with an expression that was trying to be casual but had too much attention in it.
Their eyes met for a fraction of a second.
Yan Ye looked away first, not because he felt anything but because he didn't have anything to say with his eyes that the rest of the semester wouldn't say louder.
If Wei Hao wanted to start a rumor, he picked a bad one. "They were at the same place" isn't scandalous. It's geography.
Give it twenty minutes and the whole class will have a version. By lunch, the whole grade. By tomorrow, we'll apparently be married.
The bell rang and he opened his notebook.
Luo Meiyin entered the classroom four minutes after the bell, which was unusual because she was never late. Species Biology was her domain and she ran it like someone who took personal offense at the concept of tardiness.
Today something was off. Her hair was pulled back tighter than usual, like she'd redone it in a hurry, and the way she set her materials on the desk carried an extra centimeter of force that the books didn't deserve. She scanned the room as she organized her notes, her gaze sweeping left to right the way it always did.
It stopped on Yan Ye for about one second longer than it stopped on anyone else.
Then it moved on.
She's not mad at me.
He watched her write the topic header on the board. The chalk pressed harder than necessary, leaving thick white lines that looked less like writing and more like engraving.
She's mad at Jiayi. And I'm the closest target she can actually reach.
The connection was straightforward. Luo Meiyin had seen them together at the district. She'd been there with Wei Hao, carrying his shopping bags, playing a role that the entire school would have had opinions about if anyone had noticed. And then she'd watched Wen Jiayi standing next to a student in broad daylight with a comfort between them that Luo Meiyin clearly found offensive.
He settled into his seat and made a quiet decision. If she came for him today, he wasn't going to absorb it the way Big Ye would have. Not out of pride, and not for himself. Because anything aimed at him today was really aimed at the only person in this world who had shown up at his door because she was worried about him.
You want to hit Jiayi, you go through me. And I bite back.
The first twenty minutes passed normally. Luo Meiyin lectured on adaptive camouflage in mid-tier monster species, her delivery polished and precise. Yan Ye took notes. The room settled into routine.
Then she paused mid-sentence, eyes still on her slides, and made a comment that sounded almost offhand.
"Of course, some students seem to receive special accommodations regardless of attendance. I suppose when certain professors take a personal interest, the rules become more flexible."
The room went quiet. Not the sudden kind, but the slow kind where everyone processes what they just heard and decides simultaneously to pretend they didn't.
Yan Ye raised his hand. He didn't wait to be called on.
"Speaking of personal interests, Professor Luo, I had a question." His voice was pleasant, conversational, the tone of a student who was genuinely curious about something mundane. "I read somewhere that the average monthly salary for an academy-level instructor in Tianmu is around 12,000 yuan. But last Saturday I happened to notice you leaving the commercial district with shopping bags from three brands that, combined, would run well past that figure." He tilted his head. "Must be some kind of investment strategy I'm not aware of. Any recommendations?"
Three seconds of absolute silence.
Then someone in the back row made a sound that was trying very hard to be a cough and failing completely.
Luo Meiyin's face went red. It started at her neck and climbed fast, and she controlled it in under a second with the practiced precision of someone who'd learned long ago how to mask reactions in front of a classroom. But a second was enough. Everyone saw it.
Her voice came back level. "Since you seem to have time for financial analysis, perhaps you can demonstrate the same diligence with the material. Stand up."
Yan Ye stood.
"Hybrid dimensional organisms. Explain the three-axis classification system, including the taxonomic exception for organisms exhibiting dual-plane metabolic function, and provide the historical basis for the current framework."
Three parts. A trap built into the second, where the standard textbook definition had a common misconception baked in that most students repeated verbatim without understanding why it was wrong. She'd taught the correct version during one of the three classes he'd missed.
Did this bitch forget I'm the learning god of this school?
He let one beat of silence pass, then another, long enough for her to think he was struggling and long enough for a few students to exchange the kind of glance that said he's done.
"The three-axis classification system categorizes hybrid dimensional organisms along origin-plane affinity, metabolic integration ratio, and behavioral autonomy index." He kept his voice at lecture pace, unhurried, like he was reading from notes he'd memorized years ago. "The taxonomic exception for dual-plane metabolic function was established because early researchers classified those organisms under the origin-plane axis by default, which created a systematic error in predicting threat behavior. The organism's metabolism draws from both planes simultaneously, meaning its behavioral patterns don't match single-plane models. The corrected framework, ratified at the 342 EA Zurich Convention, introduced a sub-classification treating dual-plane metabolism as an independent variable rather than a modifier."
He paused. Luo Meiyin's expression hadn't changed, but she wasn't blinking.
"The historical basis was the Meridian Rift Incident of 338 EA, where three separate research teams in different countries independently misclassified a dual-plane predator and lost field personnel because the behavioral predictions from single-plane taxonomy were wrong. The Convention standardized the correction across all four federations within two years."
The question was answered. All three parts, trap included. He could have stopped there.
But she'd asked for a demonstration of diligence, and Big Ye had never been the type to stop at "sufficient" on an academic question.
"As a regional example, the Crimson-Shell Mantid native to Tianmu's eastern forest preserve is technically a dual-plane hybrid, which surprises most people because it's a T1 creature that looks about as threatening as an angry lobster. The biology department uses it as an unofficial mascot. I believe there's even a plush version in the faculty lounge."
Someone in the second row snorted. The sound broke the tension and suddenly half the class was laughing, the kind of laughter that comes from relief as much as humor. The Crimson-Shell Mantid was apparently common knowledge among students, and the fact that their professor didn't know it made the moment land twice as hard.
Luo Meiyin stood at the front of the room holding a piece of chalk with enough force to leave marks on her palm.
Yan Ye sat down without smiling. The room was doing that for him.
The rest of the period passed in that particular atmosphere where nothing has officially happened but everyone is replaying the same sixty seconds on a loop. Luo Meiyin taught the remaining material without looking in his direction once. The other students took notes with slightly better posture than usual, the way people sit when they've witnessed something and want to appear uninvolved.
Yan Ye watched the slides and let his mind run.
The satisfaction was already fading. What replaced it was colder and more useful.
She's not going to forget this. Teachers don't forget being humiliated in their own classroom. And Luo Meiyin isn't the type to absorb a hit and move on. She's the type to file it, plan around it, and wait for the moment she can swing back without witnesses.
He thought about power, the kind that didn't register in tiers. Luo Meiyin was T2, which by awakener standards was nothing special. But strength in a school wasn't measured in tiers. It was measured in influence, in relationships, in the willingness to use institutional leverage against people who couldn't fight back on the same field.
How many people in this world have been destroyed by someone nobody took seriously? Not because they were strong, but because they were willing to use everything they had against a person who made them feel small.
One of those can take down an empire, and nobody sees them coming because nobody wrote a novel about them.
He filed Luo Meiyin as a long-term problem, the kind that wasn't immediate or physical but was present and patient and aimed at someone he cared about more than he cared about being careful.
I just put myself between her and Jiayi on purpose. Smart? No idea. Would I do it again?
Every time.
The hallway after class was the usual controlled chaos of two hundred students trying to reach five different rooms through three corridors. Yan Ye moved through the crowd with his bag over one shoulder, still thinking about chalk gripped too hard and eyes that lingered too long.
He saw her from about fifteen meters away. Silver hair, unmistakable even in a crowded corridor. Wen Jiayi was stepping out of a faculty office with a stack of folders, heading in the opposite direction.
He changed course and walked straight to her. No hesitation, no checking whether other students were watching, no internal debate about whether approaching a teacher in a hallway was appropriate. The version of him that would have cared about any of that had died somewhere around death one-fifty in a white void.
"Hey."
She looked up from the folders. The smile came immediately, small and unplanned, the one she never seemed to prepare in advance. "Hey. How was class?"
"Educational." He fell into step beside her, matching her pace. "Jiayi."
Something in his tone shifted and she caught it. The smile stayed but her eyes sharpened.
"Luo Meiyin. Is she giving you trouble?"
The hesitation lasted less than half a second. Her gaze dropped for a fraction of a beat before meeting his again.
"No. It's just normal faculty stuff. Nothing worth worrying about."
That was a lie. And "normal faculty stuff" is the phrase people use when they don't want to explain what's actually happening.
He knew it. She knew he knew it. The corridor moved around them, students flowing in both directions, and the space between them held the acknowledgment without either of them naming it.
He didn't push. He said it the same way someone would say "call me if your car breaks down," casual and matter-of-fact and completely non-negotiable.
"If she does anything, tell me. I'll handle it."
Jiayi looked at him for a full second. Something shifted in the way she was standing, a small adjustment in her shoulders that he wouldn't have noticed two weeks ago but Combat Reading at 29% proficiency made impossible to miss. The tension she'd been carrying loosened by a fraction.
"...Thank you." The word came out quieter than her usual voice, and she seemed surprised by her own tone.
"...Thank you." The word came out quieter than her usual voice, and she seemed surprised by her own tone.
She looked down at the folders in her arms for a second. Then, without looking up, she adjusted her grip on them — a small, unnecessary movement that gave her hands something to do.
"You're seventeen, you know you can't actually handle everything, right?" Her voice stayed light, but there was something underneath it that wasn't light at all..
Seventeen on paper.
"I know."
"Then why say it?"
He thought about the answer for a second longer than he needed to. Not because he didn't know, but because the honest version felt like more than he'd meant to give her in a hallway between classes.
"Because I meant it."
She finally looked up.
Whatever she was going to say next, she didn't say. Her lips parted and closed again, and she glanced past him at the students still flowing through the corridor, the ones who had no idea a conversation was happening two feet from them.
"I have to get to next period," she said.
"Me too."
Neither of them moved for another half-second.
Then they moved. He turned left, she turned right, and the hallway swallowed them both back into the current of students and schedules and the ordinary machinery of a Monday morning.
The ETT hummed beneath him on the ride home. Tianmu City scrolled past the window, all green canopy and glass and the distant glow of crystal-powered street lamps warming up for the evening.
He should have been thinking about Luo Meiyin. About how he'd just made a permanent enemy in a school he had to attend for another fourteen months. About the ways institutional power could be turned against a student who embarrassed the wrong teacher.
But that wasn't what stayed.
What stayed was the half-second before Jiayi had said "no."
He didn't know her well enough to read her. Twelve days wasn't long enough to know what anyone's tells looked like. But something had been wrong with that half-second. And it was going to bother him for the rest of the day.
It could mean nothing.
He watched the city pass the ETT window for another minute before answering himself.
No. It meant something.
He pulled out his phone and opened a blank note. Two words at the top.
Luo Meiyin.
He'd start there.