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One catch, one credit restored. Luo Wei's pulse jumped.
"Senior, just to be clear , is it one credit total no matter how many people you catch, or one credit per person?"
An important distinction. If it was per person, she needed to start laying bait right now. Even if the others had no intention of slipping out to steal their letters back, she would find a way to make them want to.
Vilonka covered her mouth, laughing. "If you catch more than one, junior, then of course you get more than one credit."
"So it's per head?" Luo Wei pressed.
Vilonka winked. "Catch as many as you want , you get a point for each one!"
The smile that had faded from Luo Wei's face came back in full.
Forty people. If she could catch forty people, she could wipe her entire deficit in a single night.
She said goodbye to Vilonka, turned on her heel, and headed straight for the academy's bulletin board.
Know your enemy, know yourself. Not one name on that wall was getting away from her.
Her four dear friends were posted there too. Too bad. Luo Wei was no longer Luo Wei tonight. Tonight, she was a ruthless, merciless credit-farming machine.
The bulletin board stood just outside the main chapel , a great stretch of wall studded with parchment sheets of every size, nailed up so densely it looked like a rash spreading across the stone. Thirty-odd students had been disciplined at the end of last semester, and thirty-odd self-criticism letters were up there to prove it.
Luo Wei had assumed hers would blend in. With so many sheets crowding each other, how conspicuous could one letter be?
She spotted it from thirty meters away.
Hers was the largest. The longest. Posted dead center in the most visible spot on the entire board.
Beside it hung a separate table listing every punished student's name alongside their deducted credits.
Luo Wei scanned it. Her own name sat at the top. Forty credits. All of them gone.
Second place: Theodore, minus twenty.
Third, tied: Gladys and Hall, minus ten each.
Fifth: Laura, minus five.
She kept reading. Further down, two names snagged her attention.
Hessel Calansis, intermediate alchemy apprentice. Minus four credits , an alchemy experiment gone wrong, one classroom reduced to ash.
Sebastian Noel, advanced incantation apprentice. Minus three credits , caught by the dormitory supervisor using water magic to steal water.
Steal water?
Luo Wei stared at the entry. Water. He stole water. Water, which cost almost nothing.
Curiosity got the better of her. She dug through the dense thicket of parchment until she found Sebastian's self-criticism letter and read the whole thing.
The picture it painted was remarkable.
Sebastian lived in the room directly above the men's dormitory washroom. After mastering advanced water incantations, he had spent every single morning using magic to draw water vapor up through the floor, pulling the steam from the washroom below and condensing it into his own wooden bucket to wash his face and feet.
Elegant. Efficient. Very nearly undetectable.
His only mistake was winter. Cold air meant the washroom's steam had nowhere to go but straight up. No matter how much hot water was boiled down below, the washroom walls stayed dry as bone. The old man who tended the washroom noticed, grew suspicious, and called the dormitory supervisor. The supervisor came upstairs, kicked the door in, and caught Sebastian mid-cast, bucket in hand.
The aftermath: half a year of back-paid water fees, plus two weeks of personally boiling the communal hot water. A lifetime of careful frugality, and he'd somehow ended up losing more than he'd ever saved.
Sebastian Noel. Luo Wei filed the name away. Half a year of getting up before dawn to steal water, every single day, without getting caught , until he did. That took a particular kind of dedication.
She continued down the list. Vena's name appeared near the bottom.
Vena, daughter of Count Weiss , deducted two credits for shoving Athena in a jealous rage over her fiancé Egbert, nearly sending Athena into the lake. Violation of the academy's prohibition on internal conflict.
Most students had lost only one or two credits. The sheer scale of the deductions against Luo Wei's group was genuinely unusual.
The sun was sinking toward the treeline. Noble girls who had gone into town for the day came filing back through the academy gates in clusters, chatting and laughing.
Luo Wei took a leisurely turn down the shaded path, drifted through the garden, and arrived at the dormitory entrance at precisely the right moment to cross paths with Vena, who was returning with a small cream cake tucked under one arm.
"Good evening, Vena."
Luo Wei gathered her skirt and climbed the steps from the other side, falling into stride beside her.
Vena's head whipped around. The moment she saw who it was, every trace of color drained from her face.
"You , what do you want?" She backed up a step. "I already wrote the apology letter. I'll go get it right now."
"Good that you remembered." Luo Wei's voice was pleasant. "I was starting to wonder."
"I didn't forget!" Vena said quickly. "You just never came to ask for it!"
"Well. Let's go see it, then." Luo Wei smiled. "I want to make sure it's really finished."
"If you don't believe me, come look for yourself." Vena's chin went up. "It's sitting right on my desk."
Her handwriting wasn't elegant. She'd spent the entire month-long break writing and discarding apology letters, over a hundred drafts before landing on one she could live with. Each letter required a hundred lines of "I'm sorry." Over ten thousand repetitions in total. Her hand had gone from aching to numb to calloused.
Vena led Luo Wei to her room, marched in, snatched the letter off the desk, and thrust it forward. "See? I told you I wasn't lying."
Luo Wei stepped inside after her. With one smooth motion, she turned and slid the door bolt into place, then crossed to where Vena stood and looked the letter over.
The parchment was trimmed to a neat square. The cursive script ran in tidy, delicate lines from top to bottom, not a single smear or blot. Someone had put real effort into this.
Luo Wei looked at it for a moment. Then she pointed. "Here. Second-to-last row, last letter. The stroke pauses in the middle , you can see where you lifted the pen and came back down. I don't like it. Write it again."
"Where? That's barely even visible, " Vena leaned in, squinting. Then she stiffened. Her eyes flew to Luo Wei's face, and her expression curdled into fury. "You're messing with me."
"And if I am?" Luo Wei's voice went flat. The warmth left it entirely. "Did you think getting someone's forgiveness was supposed to be easy?"
She reached out and snatched the letter.
"An apology letter." She dropped it on the floor. "Worthless."
"My letter!" Vena shrieked. "You crazy bitch!"
"Crazy?" Luo Wei kicked the parchment skidding across the floor, shot her hand out, and closed her fingers around Vena's throat. She squeezed. "Vena. I told you early on. My temper is not good."
Vena choked, clawing at her wrist. Her face went red. "I wrote — what you wanted—" she rasped. "What more do you want from me?"
Her voice cracked at the edges, close to tears. "I worked on that for so long."
"Shh." Luo Wei's tone stayed quiet, almost gentle. "Not so loud. If someone hears you out there, I'll break your neck."
The fear that crossed Vena's face was not performance. Her whole body went rigid.
Lunatic. Luo Wei was a lunatic.
"Tsk." Luo Wei shook her head, something between contempt and disappointment in her expression. "I thought you had some spine. You were willing to scheme with Athena against me, and now you won't even fight back?"
"I didn't." Vena was shaking. "I didn't scheme against you with her."
"No? Those men in the alley — whose idea was that?"
"That was Athena!" The words tumbled out fast and desperate. "All of it, that was her plan. She tried to use me, but I listened to what you said , I didn't go along with it!"
"It's true, you have to believe me. I was the one who called the city guards. I was afraid you'd actually get hurt, and I wanted to turn it back on her, let her deal with what she'd set in motion." Vena's voice was ragged. "I'm not a good person, but I would never come up with something that filthy. And I'm a follower of the Goddess of Justice. If I ever betrayed justice, the divine punishment would fall on me."
➤ Next: Good Friends, Lend a Hand
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