Merchant Gu was the kind of man who sweated enthusiastically. Not from exertion—from commitment. He threw himself into perspiration the way he threw himself into trade negotiations: completely, without reservation, producing results that were impossible to ignore.
"Splendid institution!" he declared for the fourth time as the merchant clan carriage rolled through Celestial Peak Academy's main gate, mopping his forehead with a silk handkerchief that had long since surrendered its absorbent capacity. "Simply splendid! The Qi density alone—my goodness, can you feel it? Like swimming in liquid spiritual energy. My cultivation base hasn't felt this invigorated since the Golden Peach Festival of '08, and that was mostly the wine talking."
Chidori smiled from the carriage seat opposite him and tried not to think about the fact that her lightning sensitivity had been screaming since they entered the mountain pass three hours ago.
Merchant Gu was her father's business partner—a portly, effusive man whose commercial instincts were exceeded only by his talent for talking. He'd agreed to escort her as a favor to the family, providing the social cover of legitimate merchant clan patronage for her instructor appointment.
The recommendation letter he'd written to the academy's administrative council had been, by his own modest assessment, "a masterwork of persuasive correspondence that I really should have charged more for."
He'd also spent the entire six-hour journey talking about spirit stone futures, silk tariff regulations, and his wife's ongoing dispute with a neighboring merchant family over the proper height of decorative garden hedges.
Chidori had listened to all of it. Not because it was interesting—it wasn't—but because Merchant Gu's ceaseless narration served as useful camouflage for the internal calculations she'd been running since the academy appeared on the horizon.
The Qi density was wrong.
Not bad-wrong. Not dangerous-wrong. Designed-wrong. The ambient spiritual energy saturating these mountains had a quality that Chidori's lightning sensitivity read as smoothed—rough edges filed away, turbulent frequencies dampened, everything shaped into a nurturing consistency that felt too uniform to be natural. Wild Qi was messy. This Qi was curated.
Like someone built a greenhouse for spiritual energy and forgot to mention it to the plants growing inside.
She filed it alongside everything else she'd noticed: the formation arrays in the academy walls that resonated at frequencies she'd never encountered. The faint, barely perceptible hum beneath the campus grounds—deep, rhythmic, like a heartbeat magnified through geological strata. And the way her own Qi signature had settled since entering the academy's influence radius, her lightning element soothing from its usual restless crackle to a warm, steady glow.
Alaric said his bond went quiet here. Karius said his voices dampened. Now my lightning is being lulled. Whatever this place is, it calms System-adjacent energies specifically.
And nobody seems to think that's unusual.
Merchant Gu deposited her at the administrative building with a final round of enthusiastic perspiration, three bone-crushing handshakes with staff members who hadn't asked for them, and a parting declaration that "any institution wise enough to hire this extraordinary young woman has earned my family's enduring patronage, and also please consider our competitive rates on bulk spirit stone procurement."
Chidori watched him go with the particular fondness reserved for people who were exhausting but meant well.
Then she turned to face the Divination Department head, and the fondness evaporated.
Elder Hua was a woman in her fifties with kind eyes and nervous hands. She wore her silver-streaked hair in a traditional elder's knot, fastened with a jade pendant that she touched—unconsciously, repeatedly—every few seconds. Her cultivation signature read as solid Core Formation, her smile as genuine, and her body language as a masterclass in contained anxiety.
"Professor Chidori! Welcome to Celestial Peak's Divination Department. We're so pleased to have someone with your qualifications." The smile was warm. The eyes were warm. The hands fidgeted with the jade pendant in a rhythm that Chidori's pattern-recognition instincts flagged as counting.
"Merchant Gu's recommendation was glowing—quite glowing—and we've been looking for an instructor with practical Qi-sensitivity experience for some time."
"Thank you, Elder Hua. I'm excited to be here."
She was. Genuinely. Beneath the cover identity and the espionage objectives and the nineteen-day countdown to an Apex Candidate assault, some part of Chidori—the part that had grown up reading divination texts by candlelight in her father's merchant caravan—was genuinely thrilled to be standing in one of the cultivation world's premier divination departments.
Elder Hua led her through the facilities. Three classrooms—one for crystal array divination, one for formation circle work, one for star-mapping with an apparatus that Chidori's professional assessment placed somewhere between "exceptional" and "I want to live here."
A celestial observation deck perched on the middle ring's highest tower, offering a panoramic view of the campus and surrounding mountain range. And a student club room on the ground floor—cozy, cluttered, smelling of incense and old paper, with mismatched furniture that suggested decades of students dragging in whatever chairs they could find.
But the crystal arrays were what stopped her breathing.
The divination classrooms housed amplification crystals tuned to spiritual frequency ranges that Chidori's lightning sensitivity could interface with directly. Standard divination instruments allowed practitioners to feel ambient Qi patterns—vague impressions, general directions, rough estimates. These crystals didn't just amplify feeling.
They amplified resolution. Paired with her natural lightning sensitivity, they would let her read individual spiritual signatures like printed text.
From the observation deck, she could feel students across the entire outer ring. Not as vague presences—as distinct, identifiable Qi patterns. Each one unique. Each one readable. Cultivation level, elemental affinity, spiritual health, and—if she pushed her sensitivity to its limits—any anomalous contamination hiding beneath the surface.
I could map every Qi signature on this campus from up here. Every student. Every teacher. Every elder. If anyone is contaminated, I'll—
She caught herself. Reeled the excitement back behind the cover identity's pleasant smile.
Stay in character. You're an enthusiastic new instructor, not a spy cataloging a potential enemy installation.
"These instruments are wonderful, Elder Hua! The crystal calibration is exceptional."
Elder Hua beamed. The expression was genuine—whatever anxiety lived behind her eyes retreated when she talked about divination. "We take pride in our program. Your recommendation mentioned extraordinary Qi-signature sensitivity—is that accurate?"
"Reasonably," Chidori said.
Understatement of the century. But "I can read individual spiritual signatures at three hundred meters and detect parasitic contamination that the System itself designed to be invisible" isn't the kind of thing you say on your first day.
Elder Hua touched her jade pendant. Glanced—briefly, barely perceptibly—toward the Headmaster's Tower visible through the observation deck's southern windows.
There. That look. She's checking on something. Or checking that something isn't checking on her.
She's anxious. Not about me—about something behind her. I've seen that look before. It's the look of someone who knows a secret they wish they didn't.
Chidori filed it away. Smiled. Asked a question about the star-mapping apparatus that she already knew the answer to, because the best way to make nervous people comfortable was to let them talk about things they loved.
Elder Hua relaxed. Talked about star-mapping. The jade pendant stopped moving for almost thirty seconds.
Chidori's first divination class had fifteen students, and she loved every one of them within the first ten minutes.
Not because they were exceptional—they were average, by and large. Foundation Early to Foundation Mid. A mix of earnest academic types who'd chosen divination because they found pattern recognition intellectually satisfying, and pragmatic types who'd chosen it because the divination track had fewer mandatory combat hours than any other specialization.
She loved them because they were students. Real students in a real classroom, looking at her with the particular combination of curiosity and skepticism that meant they wanted to learn but hadn't decided yet if she was worth learning from. After three months of life-or-death coalition operations—fighting System hosts, planning infiltrations, watching people she cared about accumulate damage that would never fully heal—the normalcy of a classroom felt like drinking cold water after a desert crossing.
Her teaching style emerged without conscious planning. She'd never taught before—not formally, not in a classroom with tiered seating and formation-enhanced acoustics and fifteen faces waiting for her to say something worth remembering. What came out was Chidori: informal, energetic, tangential.
She started a diagram on the teaching board—atmospheric Qi flow patterns, the basic methodology of reading weather through spiritual pressure analysis. Got halfway through the second curve, saw something interesting in the way the chalk interacted with the board's formation-enhanced surface, abandoned the diagram to explore the interaction, started a new diagram that was actually better, got excited about a tangential observation regarding how formation arrays in lecture halls inadvertently created micro-Qi currents that students unconsciously responded to—
"—which means your seating choice isn't random. You're sitting where the ambient flow feels most comfortable to your elemental affinity. Look around. How many fire-element students are sitting near the south-facing wall?"
Every fire-element student was sitting near the south-facing wall. The realization hit the class like a small wave—heads turning, counting, confirming.
"You've been divining since you sat down," Chidori said. "You just didn't know you were doing it."
That got them. The shift from polite attention to genuine interest—the particular brightening that happened when students realized they already possessed the ability their instructor was about to teach them.
She showed them Qi patterns. Not described—showed. Other divination instructors taught students to close their eyes and feel, to meditate on ambient energy and interpret vague impressions. Chidori held her hand above the crystal array on her teaching desk, let her lightning sensitivity interface with the amplification matrix, and discharged a controlled arc of golden-white energy that traced the invisible Qi currents in the room like illuminating ink poured into flowing water.
The classroom's ambient energy lit up. Currents of spiritual flow became visible—rivers of Qi moving through the formation arrays, pooling in corners, eddying around students' cultivation bases. The fire-element students' Qi signatures glowed warm orange near the south wall. The water-element students pulsed cool blue near the door. The whole room's invisible architecture, suddenly, brilliantly revealed.
Fifteen students stared at the illuminated air with expressions that ranged from awe to the particular discomfort of people realizing they'd been swimming in an ocean they couldn't see.
"Pattern recognition," Chidori said, lowering her hand. The lightning faded. The patterns disappeared. "That's all divination is. Seeing what's already there. The universe isn't hiding from you—you just haven't learned to look yet."
The class applauded. Not the polite, required applause of academic obligation. The startled, genuine kind.
Don't get used to this, she told herself. You're not here to be a good teacher. You're here to scan 1,800 students for parasitic contamination and identify an Observation Node beneath the campus.
But the warmth in her chest didn't listen to operational priorities. The warmth was its own thing, stubborn and inconvenient and completely immune to strategic reasoning.
The Student Divination Club met after hours in the ground-floor club room—the cozy, incense-scented space that Elder Hua had shown her during the tour. Mismatched chairs arranged in a rough circle. Star charts covering every available wall surface, some accurate, most enthusiastically wrong. A crystal array on the central table, older and less refined than the classroom equipment but functional.
Five students showed up. The minimum required for official club status.
Chidori tried not to take this personally. Five was fine. Five was manageable. Five was absolutely not a commentary on her first-day performance or the inherent appeal of divination as a student activity.
Three of the five were genuine divination enthusiasts: a girl with round glasses and an enthusiasm that bordered on religious fervor, a serious-faced boy who took notes on everything including the weather, and a quiet Year 2 student who'd been in her class that morning and hadn't stopped asking questions since.
The other two were boys who kept glancing at each other and grinning in the way that suggested their attendance had less to do with celestial pattern recognition and more to do with the fact that someone in the dormitory had described the new divination instructor as "the pretty lightning lady."
Wonderful. My first club meeting has a two-fifths thirst-to-scholarship ratio. Song would be appalled. Alaric would find it funny. Karius wouldn't notice.
"Welcome to the Divination Club," Chidori began, adjusting the central crystal array's alignment with practiced fingers. "I'm Professor Chidori. This is an informal study group focused on practical Qi-pattern reading—we'll be doing exercises, discussing techniques, and hopefully building a community of students who are interested in—"
"Professor Chidori?" The girl with round glasses—Fei, according to the signup sheet, Year 2, Foundation Early, enthusiasm rating: concerning—raised her hand before Chidori had finished her second sentence. "Can you really predict the future?"
Chidori blinked. "Divination isn't prediction. It's pattern recognition. You observe Qi flows, identify recurring patterns, extrapolate probable outcomes. It's closer to weather forecasting than prophecy."
Fei nodded solemnly and wrote in her notebook.
"What are you writing?"
"What you said."
"Good. That's—"
"'Divination is prophecy, but for weather,'" Fei read back. "Is that accurate?"
"That is literally the opposite of what I—"
"What's your first prophecy for us, Oracle?" The serious boy—Tao, Year 2, Foundation Early, note-taking intensity: clinical—leaned forward with an expression that suggested he'd been waiting his entire academic career for a genuine oracle to arrive and wasn't going to let a minor detail like reality undermine the moment.
"I'm not an Oracle," Chidori said with the patient emphasis of someone explaining basic physics to a person who had decided gravity was optional. "I'm an assistant professor. And I was just explaining that divination isn't—"
A crash.
Student three—the quiet one from her morning class—had reached for one of the crystal array's calibration stones and knocked the entire formation off the table. The array hit the floor and discharged its stored Qi in a single radiant pulse—a harmless but startling burst of spiritual energy that rippled across the room like a stone dropped in still water.
Chidori reacted on instinct. Her hand came up, lightning arcing from her fingertips in a controlled discharge that caught the errant Qi pulse mid-propagation and redirected it harmlessly into the ceiling formation array, which absorbed it with a faint hum. The technique was precise, reflexive, and took approximately one-third of a second.
It also illuminated the club room's ambient Qi for the duration of the arc—golden-white lightning tracing every current, every flow, every invisible thread of spiritual energy in the space. Including the atmospheric patterns she'd been unconsciously reading since entering the room.
Patterns that, now briefly visible, contained a very specific formation pressure system building over the eastern campus.
She didn't consciously interpret the pattern. Her sensitivity did that automatically—the way a sailor reads wind direction without thinking, the way Alaric reads formation architecture through his contamination. The knowledge arrived fully formed, unasked for, instantly forgotten as she focused on making sure the crystal array hadn't cracked.
"If one more person asks me about love divination," Chidori muttered, setting the displaced crystals back on the table with more force than strictly necessary, "a tree is going to fall on the dining hall."
Silence.
She looked up. All five students were staring at her. Fei's pen was moving across her notebook with the focused intensity of someone transcribing sacred text.
"What are you writing?"
"Your first prophecy, Professor."
"That wasn't a prophecy! That was a complaint!"
Fei looked up. Her round glasses reflected the club room's formation-light, giving her the appearance of a very earnest owl. "The Oracle speaks in complaints," she said, with a reverence that
Chidori found deeply, fundamentally alarming. "Noted."
Tao was also writing. The quiet student was writing. Even the two thirst-motivated boys were writing—apparently startled out of their original agenda by the lightning display and now genuinely invested in whatever was happening.
Five students. Five notebooks. Five people recording her irritated mutterings as if they were divinely transmitted wisdom.
This is fine. This is completely fine. I expressed frustration and five teenagers decided it was scripture. This is a normal and healthy classroom dynamic that will definitely not escalate.
She took a breath. Smiled. Resumed the crystal array exercises with the determined cheerfulness of someone who had decided, firmly and finally, that this was not going to become a thing.
It became something else first.
Twenty minutes into the exercises—basic Qi-pattern reading, students attempting to identify elemental signatures in the ambient energy using the crystal array as an amplification focus—Chidori's enhanced sensitivity picked up something that drove every thought of accidental prophecy and enthusiastic note-taking from her mind.
Contamination.
Not bonds. Not the aggressive, visible signatures of System-integrated hosts. Something far subtler—so subtle that without the crystal array's amplification AND her natural lightning sensitivity working in concert, she would have missed it entirely. A residue. A stain. The spiritual equivalent of dust on a surface that should have been clean.
Three of the five students carried it.
Fei had it. A faint shimmer in her Qi signature, barely detectable even at close range. Tao had it—marginally stronger, as if he'd been exposed more recently or more intensely. The quiet student had it, threaded through her cultivation base like smoke through fabric.
The two boys were clean.
Chidori maintained her smile. Her hands stayed steady on the crystal array. Her lightning crackled at its normal rhythm—warm, golden-white, betraying nothing.
Three out of five. Sixty percent of a random sample of divination students have faint System contamination residue.
Not bonds. Not even pre-bonds. More like... ambient exposure. As if they've been standing in System-contaminated rain without an umbrella. Background radiation from a source so pervasive that the students don't know they're soaking in it.
If that ratio holds across the student body... 1,800 students... sixty percent...
She didn't finish the calculation. The number was too large and its implications too terrifying to process while maintaining a pleasant expression and correcting Fei's crystal alignment technique.
Over a thousand students passively contaminated. Not bonded. Not controlled. Just... pre-treated. Softened. Like soil prepared for planting.
The academy isn't just sitting on System infrastructure. It's being used as a cultivation medium. Growing hosts before they're harvested.
She ran the rest of the club meeting on autopilot. Exercises. Corrections. Encouraging words. The warm, enthusiastic professor doing warm, enthusiastic professor things while her mind screamed behind the performance.
The students left in good spirits. Fei paused at the door to confirm tomorrow's meeting time, her notebook clutched to her chest like a holy text. "Same time tomorrow, Professor?"
"Same time."
"I'll bring more people. I know three girls in Frost Wing who would love this."
"That's... great. The more the merrier."
Fei beamed. Departed.
Chidori sat alone in the club room. The incense had burned down to embers. The crystal array hummed on the table, still attuned to ambient campus energy, still feeding her sensitivity data she no longer wanted to receive.
Three out of five. Sixty percent.
I need to tell Alaric. Tonight.
[Room 3C, Faculty Residence, Building 7. Evening.]
Chidori had unpacked with the particular efficiency of someone who'd spent her childhood moving between merchant caravan stops—everything had a place, everything was accessible, nothing was permanent. The room already showed her personality despite the impermanence: mismatched trinkets from home arranged on the windowsill, a tea set positioned on the desk with more care than she'd given to hanging her clothes, and a stack of divination reference texts teetering beside the sleeping mat.
The knock came at the seventh bell. Two taps, pause, one tap. Their signal.
She opened the door. Alaric stood in the hallway carrying two cups—the spiced tea she liked, from Hall 2's faculty service. He'd remembered.
He always remembers. The small things. The specific things. The tea I drink, the way I take it, the fact that I need something warm in my hands when I'm processing information. He catalogs the people he loves the way he catalogs cultivation theory—thoroughly, attentively, with genuine interest in the architecture.
"Come in."
Door closed. Alaric set up the privacy formation—improved since yesterday, incorporating observations about the building's ambient Qi flow to create a more natural dampening pattern. The formation arrays in the walls would register their conversation as standard background noise.
They sat cross-legged on her sleeping mat. Hands intertwined—automatic now, the default configuration of two people who'd learned that physical contact grounded them when the world tilted. Chidori's lightning crackled between their palms in soft golden pulses. Alaric's bond, threading through his fingers where their skin touched, settled into something that almost resembled peace.
"Three out of five," she said. No preamble. The information was too urgent for conversational transitions.
He understood immediately. "Your club students?"
"Faint contamination residue. Not bonds. Ambient exposure. They don't know it's there. I barely detected it, and only because the crystal arrays amplified my sensitivity." She squeezed his hand.
"Alaric. If that ratio holds across 1,800 students—"
"Over a thousand passively contaminated." His expression sharpened—the particular focus that replaced his usual self-deprecating warmth when operational reality demanded it. "The ambient Qi. My bond resonates with it. Karius's voices quiet down. Now students have System contamination residue."
He was quiet for a moment, processing. She could almost see him building the model—connecting data points, forming hypotheses, mapping the architecture of a conspiracy that used nurturing energy as a delivery mechanism.
"This place isn't what it appears," he said.
"Is anywhere ever what it appears?"
The wryness was reflexive—Chidori's default response to situations that were too overwhelming to face without humor acting as a pressure valve. He recognized it, because he did the same thing, because they'd been doing the same thing together for months.
He told her about Mo Ye. The pointed question about motherboard damage. The System's anomalous scan results. The blue eyes behind the dragon skull mask, watching from the back row with the particular attention of someone who'd already made conclusions and was waiting for confirmation.
Chidori listened. Considered.
"A student who asks about damaged dantian-meridian junctions and can't be scanned by the System," she said. "She's hiding something serious."
"I know."
"She might be an ally."
"I know that too."
"Or a threat."
"Or both." Alaric's mouth twitched—not quite a smile. "Most interesting people are both."
"You sound like Song."
"Song would say it more elegantly."
She laughed. Brief, genuine—the sound escaping before operational gravity could suppress it. His hand tightened around hers. Lightning crackled warm.
They compared notes for an hour. Karius's coded report about Training Ground 4's anomalous formation signatures. The contaminated students. Mo Ye's impossible knowledge. The Headmaster's Qi-embedded welcome note. The ambient energy that calmed every form of System contamination they'd brought through the gates.
The list of what they knew was short. The list of what they didn't know filled the entire hour.
Before Alaric left: a kiss. Brief. Warm. Her lightning flickered golden across his lips, and his bond—the 47% scar that never fully quieted—settled for a moment into something that wasn't peace but was adjacent to it. Close enough to remember what peace felt like. Close enough to miss it.
"Be careful tomorrow," she said at the door. "Office hours. Mo Ye will come."
"Probably."
"When she does—be careful. She reads people. Like you read formations."
"Noted."
He stepped into the hallway. Turned back. "The tea was good."
"You brought it."
"I know. I have excellent taste."
"In tea."
"In everything."
The door closed on his retreating smile. Chidori stood in her room, listening to his footsteps next door, and allowed herself precisely five seconds of feeling the warmth before operational reality reclaimed her attention.
Three out of five. Sixty percent. Over a thousand students, pre-contaminated by an environment that's supposed to be nurturing.
Nineteen days until Apex Candidates come looking for us. And the place we've hidden might be more dangerous than what we're hiding from.
She lay down. Sleep didn't come easily—it never did when the numbers were bad. But the spiced tea was warm in her stomach, and the memory of Alaric's hand was warm in her palm, and eventually the academy's soothing Qi did what it was designed to do: it settled her lightning, smoothed her edges, and pulled her down into rest.
She dreamed of weather forecasting. Of patterns in the sky that everyone else called prophecy and she called paying attention.
[Morning. Day 4.]
Chidori walked to her eight o'clock class along the outer ring's main pathway, sipping tea from a to-go cup she'd acquired from Hall 2's early service. The air was crisp. Students were beginning to fill the paths—morning routines, early training sessions, the particular energy of an institution waking up.
She passed Dining Hall 2.
Stopped.
A tree had fallen on the building.
Not a small tree. A spiritual oak—three hundred years old by Chidori's estimate, its trunk wider than a carriage, its branches spanning forty meters in every direction. It had come down sometime before dawn, between meal services, and its enormous canopy had crushed the dining hall's eastern entrance with the casual indifference of something that had been standing since before the academy was built and had simply decided, overnight, to stop.
No injuries. The timing had been precise—after the night cleaning staff departed, before the morning service began. Formation repair crews were already swarming the site, spiritual energy flashing as they stabilized the damaged roof structure and began the process of removing a tree that weighed more than most buildings.
Students crowded the perimeter. The atmosphere was part spectacle, part chaos, part the particular excitement that accompanied any break from institutional routine.
Chidori stared at the wreckage.
If one more person asks me about love divination, a tree is going to fall on the dining hall.
Chidori recalled her words the day before.
A tree.
On the dining hall.
"Professor Chidori!"
The voice came from her left. Fei materialized at her elbow with the silent efficiency of someone who had been specifically waiting for this moment—round glasses reflecting the morning light, notebook already open, pen already poised.
"Your prophecy, Professor." Fei's voice carried a reverence that Chidori felt in her bones as the specific emotional register of impending disaster. "The tree. The dining hall. You said it yesterday. It happened."
"That was a coincidence."
The word left her mouth and entered Fei's notebook simultaneously, as if the girl's pen operated on a direct transcription link from Chidori's vocal cords.
"The Oracle calls her miracles 'coincidences,'" Fei read aloud, underlining something. "Noted."
"Fei. Listen to me carefully. I am not an oracle. I didn't predict this. I made an exasperated comment about a tree falling on a dining hall because I was frustrated, and then a tree fell on a dining hall. Those two events are not causally—"
"Should I inform the other club members?" Fei asked, pen still moving. "I feel they should know. For documentation purposes."
"Documentation purposes? What documentation—"
"Tao is already designing a tracking system. For your prophecies. Date, time, exact wording, fulfillment timeline. He says rigorous methodology is essential for establishing the evidentiary basis of prophetic accuracy." Fei looked up from her notebook. Her round glasses were very serious. "He wants to calculate your hit rate."
Chidori looked at the fallen tree. Looked at Fei. Looked back at the tree.
The spiritual oak lay across Dining Hall 2's entrance like a monument to the universe's sense of humor—ancient wood split along formation-stress lines, branches still crackling with residual Qi, its root system torn from earth that had held it upright for three centuries.
She had said those words yesterday. An exasperated complaint. Not a prediction. Not a reading. Not a divination of any kind. Just frustration vocalized into ambient air.
And the ambient air had... delivered.
That was a coincidence. Atmospheric Qi pattern analysis—which I performed unconsciously when the lightning illuminated the club room—would have registered the spiritual oak's root degradation as a formation pressure anomaly in the eastern campus micro-environment. My subconscious read the pattern and translated it into colloquial language. "A tree is going to fall on the dining hall" wasn't prophecy. It was high-resolution weather forecasting expressed as irritation.
That is a completely rational, scientifically sound explanation for what just happened.
The problem is that nobody is going to care about the rational explanation. Not when the new divination instructor called it twenty hours in advance.
Fei was still writing.
"Fei."
"Yes, Professor?"
"Please don't start a religion."
Fei's pen paused. She considered this with the gravity of someone evaluating a divine commandment.
"I'll do my best, Professor," she said. "But I make no promises."
Oh no.
Chidori walked to class. Behind her, the formation crews continued dismantling the fallen oak. Behind them, Fei was already walking toward the dormitories with her notebook open, pen moving, the particular energy of someone spreading news that she considered not just important but sacred.
Nineteen days until the Apex Defense Protocol timer expired.
One day until the Divination Club's second meeting.
Chidori was beginning to suspect the second event might be more dangerous than the first.