The chamber, once sealed, felt smaller than it had looked from the doorway.
Not in size. In sound. The corridor outside had carried its own particular silence, the kind that pressed against the ears from a distance, patient and diffuse. This was different. This silence sat directly against the skin, close enough that Lin Yue could hear the faint rasp of his own breathing and nothing beneath it—no hum of terminals, no distant murmur of players, no current of air moving anywhere at all. It was the silence of a room that had never been meant to carry sound in the first place.
