Chapter 147: Questions the Board Won’t Take

Chapter 147: Chapter 147: Questions the Board Won’t Take

The Game Hall had a way of telling Lin Yue when something had changed before anyone said a word about it.

It wasn’t in the noise. The noise was the same as always—terminals chiming, someone’s boots scuffing tile two corridors over, the low administrative hum that never quite stopped. It was in the shape of the noise. The way conversations near the Settlement Board thinned out half a beat too fast when Bai Wuyin walked past them. The way a pair of players checking their rank would glance at the Board, then at Bai Wuyin, then back at the Board, as if confirming something they didn’t want to say out loud.

Four days since Yinshan Academy had closed. Four days since Su Qing had pulled him aside to explain what the second Bai Wuyin entry actually meant, and how carefully she’d kept it contained.

It wasn’t contained anymore.

Lin Yue noticed it on the first day and said nothing, because noticing wasn’t the same as knowing what to do about it. He noticed it again on the second day, more of it, spreading the way water spreads through a crack that’s already there. By the third day, he’d started counting the glances the way he counted most things that mattered—without visible effort, filed nowhere anyone could see.

By the fourth day, he stopped pretending it would simply run its course.

"They’re doing it again," Bai Wuyin said. His voice was very small.

They were standing near the edge of the atrium, close enough to the Board that avoiding it entirely would have looked stranger than walking past it. Bai Wuyin had drifted half a step nearer to Lin Yue without seeming to notice he’d done it—a small, unconscious motion, the kind of thing a genuinely frightened twelve-year-old might do without thinking. Lin Yue had watched him do it a hundred times over the past six weeks. He still couldn’t always tell, in the moment, how much of it was instinct and how much of it was performance. He suspected, increasingly, that the distinction didn’t matter as much to Bai Wuyin as it did to him.

"I know," Lin Yue said.

"Why are people looking at me?"

"They’re curious."

"About what?"

Lin Yue didn’t answer immediately. He let his eyes move toward the Board instead—toward the line where Bai Wuyin’s name sat twice, the second entry still carrying its strange, wordless symbol, still refusing to resolve into anything a normal player record should show.

"You know," he said.

Bai Wuyin looked away. His hand found the strap of his sketchbook and tightened around it, a small, visible motion that would have read, to anyone watching from across the atrium, as exactly what a scared child’s hand should do.

"I don’t like it," he said.

It was, Lin Yue thought, a true sentence. That was the part that made it hard to read. Bai Wuyin could be genuinely unsettled by the attention and still be performing the shape of that unsettlement for the benefit of everyone not standing close enough to see the difference. Both things could be real at once. Lin Yue had learned, slowly, not to assume one canceled out the other.

"It’ll pass," Lin Yue said, which wasn’t quite a lie and wasn’t quite the truth either.

Bai Wuyin didn’t answer that. He just kept walking, close to Lin Yue’s side, small and quiet and exactly as visible as he needed to be.

The rumor, when Lin Yue finally let himself listen to its shape instead of just its presence, was worse than the truth in every direction except one.

He heard fragments of it over two days, in the gaps between conversations that stopped when he got close enough to matter, in the pieces people didn’t bother lowering their voices for because they assumed he already knew.

"His name appeared twice."

"He died once. Came back."

"He’s not actually twelve—he’s been here longer than any of us."

"The System forgot to clear an old entry."

"He might be an NPC."

"He might be tied to an old instance nobody’s supposed to remember."

"Someone said an Arbiter’s protecting him. That’s why nothing’s happened."

None of it was accurate. All of it circled something real, the way smoke circles a fire nobody’s found yet. Lin Yue found that he disliked the rumor more than he disliked the truth, which surprised him only a little. The truth, whatever it turned out to be, was at least anchored to something. The rumor filled every blank space with whatever frightened people most, and frightened people repeated it faster than anyone could correct it.

Rumors did what records couldn’t. They didn’t need evidence. They only needed an audience willing to keep passing them along.

He thought about saying something to Su Qing about it—about how the story had outgrown the discretion she’d tried to give it—but there wasn’t much a warning would change at this point. The rumor was already loose. All that remained was managing what happened next.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

Cai Feng found them on the fourth day, near midafternoon, in front of the Settlement Board itself.

Lin Yue heard her before he saw her—her voice carried in a way that made it clear she wanted it to carry, pitched just loud enough to draw attention without quite crossing into a shout.

"Two entries," she said. "Two."

She was standing a few paces from the Board, one hand raised toward it, finger extended at the line where Bai Wuyin’s name sat doubled. A handful of players had already drifted close enough to listen, the way people always drifted toward anything that promised to become a scene.

"Somebody explain that to me," Cai Feng said.

Lin Yue felt Bai Wuyin go still beside him—not the flat, unreadable stillness Lin Yue had come to associate with the private version of him, but the visible kind, the kind meant to be seen. Small shoulders. Lowered eyes. A child bracing for something he didn’t understand.

He was good at it. Lin Yue had stopped being surprised by how good.

"Cai Feng," Lin Yue said, keeping his voice level as he stepped closer. "That’s not a conversation to have here."

"Then where?" Cai Feng said, not looking at him. "Because I’ve asked around. Nobody’s got an answer. Nobody’s even trying to get one." Her eyes cut toward the Board again. "That’s his name. It’s there twice. He’s standing right here." A short, humorless breath. "So which one is supposed to be real?"

Someone in the small crowd—Lin Yue didn’t recognize the voice—offered, "Maybe it’s a display error."

"Then why hasn’t it corrected?" Cai Feng said immediately, as if she’d been waiting for exactly that objection. "The System catches everything. You all know that. It catches people stepping three inches outside a rule. It flags bad data before it finishes loading." She swept a hand toward the Board. "This has been sitting there for four days. Untouched."

Nobody answered that. Lin Yue watched the silence settle over the small crowd and understood, with the flat clarity he applied to most things, that Cai Feng had just said the one sentence nobody in the Hall could argue with.

She wasn’t wrong. That was what made this dangerous.

"Maybe the System hasn’t noticed," someone else offered, weaker this time.

"The System notices everything," Cai Feng said. "That’s the whole point of it noticing."

More players had gathered by then—not a crowd exactly, but enough bodies for the open space in front of the Board to start narrowing, enough attention converging in one place that Lin Yue could feel the shape of the danger shifting under his feet. Not physical danger. He’d stopped worrying about that the moment he recognized Cai Feng’s tone. This was worse, in its way, because it couldn’t be blocked or outrun. The more people who heard this conversation, the less anyone would be able to control what they carried away from it.

Cai Feng turned toward the Board’s administrative panel—a smooth section of the wall that, as far as Lin Yue understood, functioned as the closest thing the Hall offered to a direct line to the System itself.

"I’m asking for a correction," she said.

Nothing happened.

"I’m asking for confirmation," she said, louder.

Nothing.

"I’m asking whether both records belong to the same player."

The silence held—no flicker of light along the panel. No chime. No text assembling itself the way it did for every routine query Lin Yue had ever watched a player run.

Someone near the back of the small crowd shifted uncomfortably. "Stop," they said, low.

Cai Feng didn’t turn around. "Why?"

"Because you’re talking to the System."

"Exactly," Cai Feng said.

It landed the way she meant it to land. Lin Yue watched the realization move through the gathered players almost as a physical thing—shoulders drawing in, eyes flicking toward the panel and then away from it, as if proximity to an unanswered question might be contagious. He understood the shape of what they were all realizing at the same moment he did. This wasn’t a glitch anymore. A glitch got corrected, eventually, the way everything in the Flow got corrected eventually. This was something the System had chosen not to touch, and chosen not to explain, and the not-explaining was somehow louder than an explanation would have been.

Lin Yue kept his own expression still and let himself do what he did best. He watched.

He thought back—not sentimentally, just methodically, laying the pieces beside each other the way he’d laid Bai Wuyin’s registration date beside Ye Xian’s sealed history two Chapters ago. Every rule violation he’d seen the System correct. Every invalid record flagged the moment it appeared. Settlement tallies updated within seconds of an instance closing. Even Gu Yanchen’s deviations, small as they’d once been, had drawn some kind of response—warnings, at minimum, before they’d escalated into something the System treated as an actual defect.

Bai Wuyin’s duplicated entry had sat untouched for four days.

Silence wasn’t the same as not knowing. The System had made that much clear before, in every other context Lin Yue had watched it operate in. Which meant this silence wasn’t ignorance.

It was a decision.

That was worse than anything Cai Feng had said out loud.

Cai Feng turned, finally, toward Bai Wuyin.

Lin Yue felt the shift before it happened—felt Bai Wuyin’s hand tighten again on the sketchbook strap, felt the small, deliberate step he took closer to Lin Yue’s side.

"Do you know why your name is there twice?" Cai Feng asked.

Bai Wuyin froze. It wasn’t subtle. His eyes dropped to the floor, his shoulders curled inward, his whole small frame going tight in a way that looked, to every player watching, exactly like fear.

Someone near the front of the crowd said, "Leave the kid alone."

"I’m asking him," Cai Feng said, "because he’s the one it belongs to."

She wasn’t cruel about it. Lin Yue noted that carefully, because it mattered. Her voice hadn’t sharpened the way it might have if this were malice instead of genuine unease. She was afraid, in her own way—afraid of a Board that wouldn’t correct itself, afraid of a silence that felt like it was hiding something dangerous. Her mistake, if it was a mistake, was turning that fear into a demand aimed at a twelve-year-old instead of the System that refused to answer her.

Before Lin Yue could decide how to intervene, Shen Rui was already moving.

He stepped between Bai Wuyin and the crowd without hesitation, without a single beat of calculation visible on his face. It wasn’t a dramatic motion. He simply closed the distance and put himself in it, the way a person moves to stand between a smaller sibling and a door about to slam.

"He’s twelve," Shen Rui said. "Leave him alone."

Cai Feng’s eyes narrowed. "Is he, though?"

The question landed harder than anything she’d said yet—not because it proved anything, but because nobody in the small crowd could answer it with any certainty anymore. Lin Yue watched the words settle over the gathered players like something physical, watched two or three of them glance at Bai Wuyin again, this time with something closer to genuine unease than curiosity.

For half a second—less than half a second, gone almost before Lin Yue’s eyes had finished registering it—Bai Wuyin’s expression went completely blank. Not frightened. Not startled. Simply empty, the way a screen goes empty between one image and the next.

Then the frightened-child mask slid back into place, seamless, and Bai Wuyin pressed a fraction closer to Lin Yue’s side, small and shaking and entirely convincing.

Nobody else had caught it. Lin Yue was fairly certain of that. He filed the half-second away without comment, the way he filed most things that weren’t ready to be spoken aloud yet.

"You don’t have enough information," Lin Yue said, finally, stepping forward enough to put himself level with Cai Feng rather than behind Shen Rui’s shoulder.

"Neither does anyone else," Cai Feng said.

"That’s why asking him won’t give you an answer."

She studied him for a moment, something sharpening behind her eyes. "You know something."

"I know there are two records," Lin Yue said. "That’s all I know that you don’t."

It wasn’t the truth. He was aware of exactly how far it fell short of the truth—the archive query, the impossible registration date, the sketchbook page Bai Wuyin had left open with an aerial view of a Game Hall no player should have ever seen from above. None of that belonged to Cai Feng, or to the small crowd gathering wider by the second, or to anyone standing close enough to overhear. He kept his voice flat and let the sentence stand as if it were complete.

Cai Feng held his gaze a moment longer, clearly unconvinced, clearly deciding it wasn’t worth pressing further in front of this many people. She looked back at the Board instead—at the two entries sitting side by side, at the second symbol that refused to resolve into anything readable.

"Fine," she said.

She let the silence stretch a beat before she spoke again, quieter this time, more to herself than to the crowd.

"If nobody’s going to explain it," she said, "I’ll remember that too."

She turned and walked off without waiting for a response, the small crowd beginning to disperse in her wake, players peeling away in twos and threes, still glancing back at Bai Wuyin as they went. The Board remained exactly as it had been. No correction. No denial. No explanation.

Nothing had changed. That was, Lin Yue thought, the worst part of all of it.

The atrium emptied out slowly, the way rooms did after something almost happened in them. Bai Wuyin slipped away sometime in the middle of it—Lin Yue caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, a small figure detaching itself from his side and moving toward the corridor without a word, sketchbook already clutched tight against his chest. Lin Yue let him go. There would be time for that conversation later, once the Hall had settled back into its ordinary noise.

Shen Rui didn’t leave.

He stood where he’d planted himself in front of Bai Wuyin, watching the last of the crowd disperse, and Lin Yue could see the tension still sitting in his shoulders even after there was nothing left to defend against.

"Somewhere quieter," Lin Yue said.

Shen Rui nodded without arguing.

They ended up in a side corridor off the cafeteria, empty at this hour, a bench pushed against the wall beneath a window that looked out on nothing in particular. Shen Rui sat down heavily, elbows on his knees, and didn’t say anything for a while. Lin Yue let the silence sit. He’d learned, mostly from watching Gu Yanchen, that some silences needed room before they turned into words.

"Lin Yue," Shen Rui said finally. "Tell me straight. Should I be worried?"

"I don’t know yet," Lin Yue said.

"That’s not a no."

"No," Lin Yue agreed.

Shen Rui exhaled slowly through his nose, dragging both hands down his face. "I’ve been thinking about it since the day it first showed up on the Board," he said. "Not just today. Every day since. I trust him. I want you to know that first, before anything else I say—I trust Bai Wuyin. I’ve seen him scared. Really scared. I’ve seen him cry over things that weren’t performances, Lin Yue, I know the difference." He paused. "I’ve seen him cling to you when something goes wrong, like you’re the only fixed point he’s got. I know what he looks like when he’s afraid."

"But," Lin Yue said.

"But I don’t know what that second entry means," Shen Rui said. "And I don’t like that nobody does. Not even the System, apparently, or if it does know, it’s decided we don’t get to." He looked over, something tired and honest in his expression. "I’m not asking because I think he’s dangerous. I want to be clear about that. I’m asking because I don’t want to find out I should have asked sooner."

Lin Yue considered that for a moment. It was, he thought, a fair distinction—the same one he’d have drawn himself, if their positions were reversed.

"That’s not a small thing to admit," Lin Yue said.

"It doesn’t feel like a small thing to carry," Shen Rui said. He let his head fall back against the wall, eyes on the ceiling. "If something’s actually wrong with him—if there’s something real behind that second entry—I want to know. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. But I don’t want to start treating him like he’s dangerous just because the System won’t explain itself. That feels like exactly the kind of thing that turns a scared kid into something worse, if he wasn’t already."

Lin Yue didn’t answer right away. He was aware, distantly, that he respected the shape of what Shen Rui had just said more than he’d expected to. Shen Rui wasn’t asking whether Bai Wuyin was dangerous. He was asking, should I be careful, and the two questions weren’t the same at all. One was a verdict. The other was concern that hadn’t decided anything yet.

"You should be careful," Lin Yue said finally.

Shen Rui looked over at him. "That’s worse."

"It’s more accurate."

Shen Rui huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, tired and a little hollow, and let it go at that. They sat in the quiet a while longer, neither of them filling it with anything else. Lin Yue found himself turning the day’s pieces over the way he always did—not just Bai Wuyin’s duplicated entry, but the shape of everything sitting alongside it. Bai Wuyin’s record contained something impossible. Ye Xian’s contained something deliberately hidden. His own contained something that contradicted his memory outright, a name blacked out in a field that should have never held one.

Three records. Three different kinds of wrong.

And a System that corrected almost everything, except, apparently, whichever of these it had decided didn’t belong to the category of things it was allowed to touch.

He didn’t say any of that to Shen Rui. Some things weren’t ready to be spoken aloud yet, and Shen Rui, for all his loyalty, wasn’t the person this particular thread belonged to.

He found Bai Wuyin an hour later, in a corner of the library nobody else bothered with, sketchbook open on his knees, charcoal moving in slow, unhurried strokes.

Bai Wuyin didn’t look up right away. "Did they stop?" he asked.

"For now," Lin Yue said.

"Cai Feng won’t."

He said it flatly, without inflection, the way he said things when he’d stopped bothering to perform for the one person who already knew better. Then, almost immediately, something in his posture shifted—shoulders drawing in again, eyes dropping—as if he’d caught himself saying too much and was already correcting for it.

Lin Yue let it pass without comment.

"You handled yourself," he said instead, settling onto the seat across from him.

"I was scared," Bai Wuyin said, and this time Lin Yue genuinely couldn’t tell—not fully, not with certainty—whether it was true or whether it was simply the sentence Bai Wuyin had decided the moment called for.

"I know," Lin Yue said, and let it be enough for both of them.

The Hall had gone quiet by the time Lin Yue found himself back at the Settlement Board, well past the hour most players bothered staying up. He hadn’t meant to come here. His feet had simply carried him this way while his mind was still turning over Cai Feng’s voice, Shen Rui’s tired honesty, the half-second of blankness that had crossed Bai Wuyin’s face and vanished before anyone else could see it.

The Board glowed faintly in the empty atrium, its light the only real source of illumination left. Lin Yue stopped in front of it out of habit more than intention, eyes drifting to the line where Bai Wuyin’s name sat doubled, the second entry still carrying the same unreadable symbol it had carried for four days.

He almost turned away.

Then the symbol flickered.

It happened without sound, without warning, the way the gallery light had flickered three days ago before a name neither he nor Gu Yanchen had recognized bled briefly into view and vanished. Lin Yue went very still, watching the space beneath Bai Wuyin’s second entry the way he might watch something he already suspected was about to move.

The old symbol dissolved. For a moment the field beneath it sat blank, an empty administrative gap where something should have been and wasn’t.

Then text assembled itself, clean and procedural, exactly the way the System rendered everything it considered routine.

[STATUS: STILL WATCHING.]

Lin Yue read it once. Then again, as if a second reading might change what it said.

It didn’t.

This wasn’t a duplicate anymore. A duplicate sat still. A duplicate didn’t update itself in the middle of the night with no notification, no warning chime, no Arbiter summoned to explain it. Whatever occupied that second record wasn’t leftover data the System had simply failed to clean up.

It was watching. It had been watching long enough, apparently, to decide it wanted him to know.

Lin Yue looked toward the corridor that led back to Bai Wuyin’s room, dark and unremarkable at this hour, then back at the Board. The words hadn’t changed. They didn’t say who was watching. They didn’t say what it wanted, or whether Bai Wuyin himself even knew it was there.

They only confirmed one thing, and confirmed it with a certainty that settled cold and precise in Lin Yue’s chest: whatever had been sitting quietly in that second record had been there long enough to wait.

And it wasn’t finished waiting yet.