"Nobody is allowed to faint before I finish inspecting them."
The announcement was made with enough seriousness that the courtyard immediately quieted.
Tang Li Yue stood beneath the porch awning with a clean notebook in one hand and a pen in the other. Xu Ren had attempted to hand her the clipboard, but she had refused on the grounds that it belonged to him now.
"You found it during the apocalypse," she had told him. "You are responsible for it."
Xu Ren had accepted this logic far too easily.
In front of the porch, the farmhouse had divided itself into the usual morning arrangement. The training mats had been laid across the cleanest part of the courtyard. Gao Jun, Fang Yi, Old Liu, Xu Ren, Chen Qiao, Zhou Han, and Lu Chengran were seated in loose rows, their backs straight as they followed the basic breathing cycles Tang Li Yue had taught them days ago.
Even Zhou Han was there.
