The meeting room of the Nightwalker Club was dark.
This wasn't to save energy, but because it wasn't needed.
In the centre of the round table, a semi-transparent projection of a barrier floated like a patchwork film. Light flowed across it, but it could never take on a solid form.
'The Academy's seal has aged to this extent.'
The speaker's tone was calm, as if delivering a weather forecast.
'If this continues, it will collapse on its own.'
The Nightwalker Club members didn't refute this.
They could all see that the Academy's seal wasn't a single barrier, but rather a system of rules that continuously corrected reality.
The Academy's seal was a system of rules that continuously corrected reality.
It wasn't used to defend against external enemies, but to conceal things whose existence 'makes the world uncomfortable'.
It concealed anomalies that shouldn't be noticed and things whose existence 'makes the world uncomfortable'. "
The Night Watch leader stood up and walked to the projection.
He reached out, but didn't touch it.
'Our goal has never been to break the seal.'
His voice wasn't loud, yet it dominated the entire space.
'Destruction will only make the world bounce back more strongly.'
He looked up at everyone.
'What we need to do is open a door.'
Someone asked softly, 'What's behind the door?'
The leader smiled.
It wasn't a pleasant smile.
'Something that shouldn't exist.'
The air was silent for a moment.
Then he added:
'At least it's something that's been judged as "shouldn't exist".'
The plan's code name was simple:
'Reveal.'
The issue was not about creating anomalies, but about refusing to continue concealing existing deviations.
Let those things that have been forcibly smoothed over by the rules be seen briefly and to a limited extent within the academy.
'As long as they become visible,' said the leader, 'the student council must respond.'
'Their greatest weakness has never been power.
'It's that they must pretend everything is under control.'
Meanwhile, in the student council's barrier monitoring room, the alarms weren't automatically categorised for the first time.
Several data curves showed slight shifts on the screen.
Though small and inconspicuous, these shifts were illogical.
The member in charge of monitoring frowned.
'This isn't a spiritual pressure surge.'
'It's as if someone is actively tampering with the seal structure.' Another person quickly pulled up the access diagram.
'The seal itself isn't damaged, and the rule hierarchy hasn't been broken.'
However, the concealment function had failed in a localised area.
The student council president stood before the screen, his expression no longer composed for the first time.
'Someone is interfering with "objects not allowed to exist" within the academy.' This wasn't an accident; it was planned.
She immediately thought of an organisation:
'The Night Club.' The moment that name was uttered, the temperature in the meeting room seemed to drop by a degree.
The Night Club had always operated in a grey area, neither openly resisting nor directly disrupting.
But once they started manipulating the rules themselves, it was no longer just an internal conflict.
'They're trying to force us to intervene,' whispered the student council president.
Because if the student council were to intervene, it would be tantamount to admitting one thing:
There really was a 'hidden anomaly' within the academy.
Once more people start to take notice of it, the meaning of the seal will begin to change.
Suddenly, the surveillance footage flickered.
A certain area appeared 'blank'.
It wasn't a black screen; it was as if that area simply didn't exist.
Data, records and logic all bypassed that area.
The student council president stared at the blank space, his eyes growing cold. "They're not trying to break down the door," he said.
'They're not trying to break down the door.
They're trying to keep the door open.'
At the same time, in the nightclub's meeting room, the leader pressed the final confirmation button.
An almost invisible crack appeared in the projected screen barrier.
Small, but enough for something to begin to breathe.
"Let's begin," he said.
He said.
"Let the world see what it has been trying to ignore."
The name had been repeatedly marked at the centre of this game in the student council's internal memos.
Not an enemy, not a target,
but a source of risk.
Li didn't know yet.
But for the first time, the academy was under pressure because of him.
Li proactively investigated the abnormal spiritual pressure first after class.
This wasn't because he had been commanded to do so, nor out of curiosity.
Rather, it stemmed from an inexplicable feeling — as if something had always been around him, yet had never been explicitly mentioned.
He didn't consult the official files.
His intuition told him that those places would only provide 'acceptable answers'.
He opted for the most basic method.
He chose to walk.
He walked along the edge of the academy, not alongside the outer walls, but in places where people would pass by without lingering:
The passageway behind the old school building; the open space before the closure notice; and the stairwell corner near the blind spot of the surveillance cameras.
The spiritual pressure readings would show anomalies here.
Not an increase, not a disturbance,
Rather, it was as if a small piece had been hollowed out.
Li stopped in an empty corridor.
It was so quiet that even echoes seemed superfluous.
He activated his portable detection device.
The reading jumped briefly, then returned to zero.
This wasn't a normal zero.
It was the kind of zero that 'shouldn't have a value in the first place'.
Li frowned.
'How could this be?'
He subconsciously pulled up the academy map.
The corridor was fully marked on the screen, with its purpose, year and maintenance records clearly displayed.
However, when he switched to the 'historical' level, the corridor became blurry.
Not missing, but skipped.
It was as if someone had torn a page out of a book.
Li walked down the corridor.
With each step, his unease grew stronger.
He suddenly realised something:
These places weren't 'unrecorded', but rather the recorder had chosen to avoid them on approach.
He stopped at the end of the corridor.
An old mirror hung on the wall.
Although the mirror was clean, it didn't reflect his complete image.
His shoulder appeared displaced in the mirror for a moment.
Li's heart skipped a beat.
At that moment, a word flashed through his mind:
Blank space.
This wasn't an official term, but rather a default, habitually ignored existence.
Li reached out, his fingertips stopping in mid-air.
He didn't touch the barrier, nor did he feel any resistance.
But Li knew clearly that there was something ahead.
'So it was inside...'
This wasn't an invasion or a broken seal.
It was a part of reality that the academy had deliberately removed in order to maintain its overall logic.
Li slowly withdrew his hand.
He suddenly understood why the recent spiritual pressure anomalies always seemed to have no source.
Because the source itself wasn't permitted to be the 'source'.
His gaze fell on the detection device.
The string of zeroed values was eerily quiet.
Li felt a chill.
What if one day he was also judged to be 'affecting overall stability'?
Would he be treated the same way?
Not explode, not disappear from public view.
But be silently moved into this blank space where no records were kept?
Li suddenly remembered that dream.
That corridor, that figure he could never catch up to.
He finally understood.
The distance in the dream wasn't because he was running slowly.
It was because she was standing somewhere she wasn't allowed to be.
Li turned off the device.
Before leaving, he glanced back at the corridor.
There was nothing, and everything felt wrong.
He muttered to himself as if confirming something:"The source isn't outside." Deep within the academy, the entity known as the 'Blank Zone' began to respond to him.