Dinner was uneventful.
The Academy dining hall served the same bland spiritual rice porridge it always did. Zhao Lingxi ate in silence. Lan Yue ate in silence. Tang Xiaoli, who was physically incapable of silence, filled the gap by telling them about a second year student who had accidentally turned himself bright blue during an alchemy experiment.
"His entire face. Blue. Like a blueberry with legs." She waved her chopsticks for emphasis. "The instructor just stared at him and said, 'Well, at least you matched your robes.'"
Zhao Han nearly choked on his porridge laughing.
Lan Yue barely heard any of it.
The hair pin sat in her pocket like a live coal. Every few minutes her fingers would brush against it, and her heart would do that annoying lurch that she was getting really tired of.
It was just a gift. A practical gift. Her mistress needed a new hair pin. The old one was cracked. This was a servant doing her job.
There was absolutely nothing romantic about it.
