Mio approached Li with an air of near-certainty.
The corridor before morning lessons was sparsely populated, with sunlight streaming through the high windows and lending an air of exceptional clarity. As she walked, she rehearsed her words in her mind: last night's dream, the notebook and the phrase that felt completely wrong no matter how she considered it.
She expected Li to be sitting by the window as usual.
Yet when she pushed open the classroom door, someone was already inside.
But not Li.
Mio's footsteps faltered.
Her gaze swept instinctively to the back row. The window seat was empty and the desk was bare — no books, no bag; it was as if the seat had never been used.
She frowned and turned to ask the classmate beside her, 'Where's Li?'
"Where's Li?"
The other girl froze.
"... Who?"
Mie's expression remained unchanged, but her heart gave a slight flutter.
"Li," she repeated. "The one who sits at the back."
Her classmate's expression shifted subtly — not confusion or deep thought, but as if her train of thought had been interrupted.
'There's never been anyone at the back.' The tone was natural, without hesitation.
Mio didn't immediately refute this.
She merely nodded slowly, as if she understood yet hadn't taken it in.
After class, she asked several other classmates.
Some frowned, some gave a perfunctory 'Ah,' while others simply laughed and suggested she might be mistaken.
"What did this person look like?"
'Can't recall.'
"The name sounds familiar, but is there someone like that in our class?"
Everyone's responses were faint and vague.
No one explicitly denied it, nor did anyone confirm it.
The name 'Li' seemed to exist on the very edge of memory itself — the moment you tried to remember it, it slipped away.
Mio stopped asking people.
She went to the staff room.
The register was open on the desk and the rustle of pages was particularly audible in the quiet room. She scanned it line by line, tracing the names slowly with her fingertip.
Nothing.
She read it three times.
From the first page to the last.
The character 'LI' did not appear anywhere.
Mio's breathing became shallower.
She returned to the records room and checked group rosters, elective lists and student profiles in the campus system.
The screen glowed, its light reflecting in her eyes.
The search results displayed: 'No matching records.'
The system didn't even indicate 'deleted'.
It was as if this person had never been recorded in the first place.
Mio sat in her chair with her back rigidly straight.
Everything around her was normal. Teachers lectured, students chatted and the bell rang on time. The world marched on in an orderly fashion.
Only she stood still.
She remembered Li.
She remembered where she had sat, the small movements she had made when turning pages and the way she had occasionally glanced out of the window. Those memories were clear and complete, without a single crack.
Yet none of it could be proven now.
Mio slowly closed the folder.
In that moment, she finally grasped the truth:
Li hadn't gone into hiding.
Li hadn't taken leave.
Rather, it was this campus, this system, this world built upon rules and records —
— was denying her very existence.
And it was doing so with remarkable proficiency.
From the outset, Mio hadn't intended to 'sneak in'.
She just wanted to check again.
The archive room was much quieter in the evening than during the day. Only half of the lights were on and the bookshelves cast elongated shadows, forming rows of silent barriers. The custodian had left early and the visitor log at the entrance stopped at four o'clock.
Mio stood outside the door for a few seconds before pushing it open and stepping inside.
She knew that records in a place like this were never wrong.
If there was no trace of Li here, then only one possibility remained.
At the far end of the archive room, several old, seldom-used terminals sat gathering dust. Mio sat down. The screen hummed softly as it lit up, its white glow reflecting on her face.
She accessed the school database.
She scrolled through the most basic records — student attendance, course schedules and activity logs — layer by layer. Rather than rushing to search for a name, she switched to a time filter.
The year Li enrolled.
The timeline on the screen slid forward smoothly.
Until it reached a certain point.
The image suddenly froze.
This wasn't a glitch or an error message.
It was that entire period—
— blank.
Course records have been interrupted.
There are no entries in the activity log.
Duty rosters, club registers and school notices all skip over those months, jumping straight to subsequent dates.
It was as if someone had gently chiselled a section away from the timeline.
Mio stared at the fractured timeline, her breathing slowing involuntarily.
She repeatedly cycled through different modules.
Attendance system:
Classroom usage logs.
Campus CCTV index tables.
The results were identical.
That period had been rendered exceptionally 'clean'.
There were no traces of deletion, no modification logs and no system warnings whatsoever. It wasn't the appearance of something that had been erased later; it felt more like—
From the very beginning, nothing had ever happened.
Mio's fingers hovered over the keyboard, hesitating to descend.
She realised something.
When a student's records were deleted, the system inevitably left gaps, mismatched IDs or at least one overwritten entry.
Yet none existed now.
All the data was aligned with excessive consistency.
It was as if time itself had automatically selected 'skip' for those months.
And that skipped period precisely overlapped with—
Li's entire time at the school.
Mio leaned back in her chair, her gaze shifting from the screen.
The archive room was quiet, broken only by the low hum of old machinery. The shelves stood in rows, seemingly never questioning the history stored within them.
Suddenly, she understood.
This wasn't someone 'deleting Li'.
It was someone rewriting the rules.
Not targeting an individual.
They were targeting the very notion of 'having existed'.
When a person is stripped of the right to be recorded, they do not merely vanish; they are judged by the world as if they had never existed.
Mio slowly rose to her feet and shut down the terminal.
The moment the screen dimmed, she realised with stark clarity that:
She had stepped into a realm forbidden to ordinary students.
And someone, on the other side of that boundary, was quietly watching.