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At three o'clock in the afternoon, the student-faculty assembly convened on time in the main chapel hall.
Luo Wei sat with the rest of her classmates on rows of long wooden benches, blinking against the fog of sleep as she stared toward the semicircular dais at the front.
She'd crawled out of bed before she was fully awake. Now she sat here feeling like her mind had drifted somewhere else entirely, and she hadn't caught a single word the dean and professors said when they took the stage.
If she dozed off for just a minute, would anyone notice?
Luo Wei looked around. No teachers patrolling. She dropped her head and closed her eyes.
She was just drifting off when laughter exploded through the hall.
Luo Wei jolted awake, certain she'd been caught sleeping — but when she looked up, every eye in the room was fixed on the front of the hall, not on her.
She blinked hard until her vision cleared, and finally made out the figures standing on the dais: Hall, Theodore, the guinea-pig senior Sebastian, and a handful of other upperclassmen.
Hall was reading his written self-criticism aloud. The laughter, it turned out, came from a single line: "I will bathe properly in the future, brew my medicine properly, and will no longer render my classmates unconscious with my smell."
Fair enough. That was pretty funny. Luo Wei laughed too.
She thought about how Hall, trying to cover his odor, had smeared himself with mud from the manure pond, only to get reported by classmates and docked points. She couldn't help it. Too much.
The dean had at least shown her some mercy, sparing her from a public self-criticism. He'd still thought to preserve some of her dignity.
Honestly, Luo Wei would take forty points docked over dying of embarrassment any day.
Aside from those few lines, Hall's self-criticism was perfectly standard. He finished quickly and stepped off the stage.
The rest weren't getting off so easily. They'd all taken part in last night's theft, and each of them had two essays to read — one of which had been rushed out just that morning.
Sebastian, the ringleader, was the first one the supervising teacher pushed forward. Both essays. In front of everyone.
Even from halfway across the hall, Luo Wei could see the dark circles under his eyes. The boy looked like a giant panda. How late had he stayed up last night?
She started to laugh — then stopped.
When it came to staying up late, she might actually have him beat.
Luo Wei pressed her fingers to the skin under her own eyes. She hadn't checked a mirror before leaving. Were her dark circles worse than Sebastian's?
Up on the dais, Sebastian was already reading at a breakneck pace, the words on the parchment blurring past like he'd bitten into something scalding. His strategy was obvious: read fast enough and nobody could actually hear the self-criticism. With impressive lung capacity, he barreled through both essays in a single breath.
The supervising teacher fixed him with a withering glare, then turned to address the hall with a face like stone.
Sebastian's conduct was egregious. Twenty points deducted.
Luo Wei winced. Twenty points just for stealing a self-criticism essay? That harsh?
Theodore had already lost twenty points last semester. Another twenty this semester would leave him with sixty.
Her conscience stabbed at her.
She was terrible. She really deserved whatever was coming to her.
The students on stage read through their essays one by one. The supervising teacher added a twenty-point penalty to each of them, then issued another warning to the student body: abide by the academy's rules, uphold personal morality.
So that's how it works. It clicked for Luo Wei now , academic points were basically the conduct scores from her previous life. Poor character, rule-breaking, disciplinary violations: you got docked hard.
After the criticism and reprimands, the academy shifted to commendations.
Students who had competed in the magic tournament back in May and brought honor to the academy were each awarded twenty points.
Theodore had barely stepped off the stage, self-criticism still in hand, when his name was called again. He jogged right back up, flashing a wide white grin and laughing like he'd just won a prize.
Minus twenty, plus twenty. Net zero.
The competition rewards had been distributed once last year too. Their team placed second, and the academy gave every member five gold coins. He'd eaten his fill for a solid month off that haul.
...
The assembly ran a full hour and a half. Luo Wei dragged herself out of the main chapel with her eyelids at half-mast and went straight back to her dormitory to sleep.
She didn't wake up until past eight that evening, the sky outside completely black.
Luo Wei ate a couple bites of bread, shrugged on her coat, and headed out.
Tonight she didn't have to watch the bulletin wall , just patrol the cordon. She could even squeeze in a short nap at the student council office.
At exactly nine, she arrived at the main gate and started making her way clockwise around the perimeter wall.
She walked and watched, scanning the base of the wall for anything carved into it. The result was the same as last night: nothing.
A full circuit without a single trace of a Magic Rune. Was the academy's magic array buried underground?
Luo Wei pressed her hand to her chin. If it was underground, how deep would she have to dig to reach it?
Fine. Time to dig.
She hadn't brought a shovel tonight, so she made do with the dip net from last night, using it to scrape at the
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