I slept with one eye open.
Not literally. That'd be exhausting. But my mana circuits hummed in passive sync all night, keyed to any shift in ambient flow. The kind of over-alert tension I used to feel during group raids with permadeath toggled on. Even in the safety of my quarters, wrapped in the illusion of calm, there was a whisper at the edge of thought: He's still watching.
By morning, there was nothing. No new messages. No flickers of movement in shadows. The book from the library sat neatly on the shelf where I'd returned it—still blank, still silent, like it had never housed a name at all.
I decided not to push further. Not yet.
Instead, I took a breath, threw on my coat, and walked out into the storm of adolescence that was Class C.
