Nobody moved first.
The common room held its breath around Tang Li's empty chair, around the closed notebook nobody wanted to touch again, around the cold tea and the jacket still hanging off the chair back like she might return any second to claim it. Lu Fan's hand hovered over nothing, fingers curled the exact shape of a wrist that wasn't there anymore, and he didn't lower it. He simply stayed like that, frozen, as if lowering his arm would be the thing that finally made it real.
Then, from somewhere down the corridor, a class began to recite.
It came slowly at first — a murmur under the floor, under the walls, easy to mistake for the wind moving through old plumbing. Then it sharpened. Voices. Several of them. Speaking together in a rhythm too even to be accidental.
Shen Rui's head came up first. "Is that—" He stopped, listened harder, and something in his face shifted from confused to genuinely bewildered. "That's a class reciting. That's an actual class."
