Huang stabs something under her bed and deposits its corpse into the hallway. She tries sticking the sword into the void to clean it, which doesn't work at all, and runs quickly to the bathroom to wipe it off with toilet paper, and runs back as the bell is ringing. She does some mana building exercises to make sure she is tired enough for sound sleep and goes to bed.

She sleeps soundly.

Xue Yang follows Lily to her bedroom and makes sure that no mals get her. 

Lily is lame and weak and pathetic and Xue Yang has nothing but contempt for her. She gives away valuable things like candy for free. And then he took the candy and threatened her and she just let him? Instead of trying to kill him back? What kind of lame person does that?

But if she died then whoever killed her would get all of the chocolate, and Xue Yang would get none of it, and he wants to take advantage of this pathetic weakling and get even more candy. She said she had gummies. Xue Yang likes gummies. And maybe she has a source for how to get more chocolate-- that would explain some of why she's giving it away for free. He needs to make sure she doesn't die before he figures out where she's getting her chocolate from. 

Coffee is Bad Actually. 

Because now Nie Huaisang can't go to sleep, and he's tired but his brain is going sosososofast, and the direction he's going in is that da-ge is dead, da-ge was supposed to be alive and now he's dead, fucking Yanli is alive and da-ge is dead and the world is never going to be right ever again. 

Nie Huaisang hadn't even known that he'd taken the picture in his personal allowance.

He yanks a bunch of power from the power sharers-- he can blame it on his uselessness tomorrow, he was practicing spells and he didn't notice how much he was taking-- and starts his one spell that actually does any good. He sketches beautiful pictures for his wall and into each one of them he pushes keep me safe, he pushes I want to be alive, he takes all his fear and his grief and his fastfastfast and he works it into a spell that will keep the mals out because he doesn't have anyone to keep him safe anymore.

Da-ge deserves, he thinks dully, to have someone who would grieve him for his own sake, whose grief isn't mingled with fear and desperation. He deserves to have someone who mourns him for some other reason than that he was useful.

If he concentrates on his drawing, everything else goes away.

In the morning, outside his door, there's a beautiful sketch of a bird and a sign that says, in English and Mandarin:

Nie Huaisang's Goods, Oddments, and Little Luxuries

Currently available:
-Visual pornography
-Commissioned sketches
-Commissioned stories

Please check back for updates on our stock!

Lan Zhan ran around with Wei Ying to half the fucking school looking for his room, and Wei Ying has no idea why. Probably it's because it would be embarrassing for the Shanghai enclave to have a second person die this early, especially given Wen Ning's and Nie Huaisang's life expectancies. Probably Lan Zhan is incredibly sick of him by now. 

They miss dinner and Wei Ying is starving. He has a little food in his pack for the cockroaches, fortunately. He doesn't know how long they can go without eating but he wants more cockroaches. And he needs them for the malia. 

He wishes tardigrades were big enough to take into the Scholomance. He would do really well with a zombie army of tardigrades. He wouldn't have to worry about starving them. The hard bit would be making them zombies in the first place.

He can't sleep, obviously. He paces back and forth in his room and wishes he'd brought something to do. He bites himself a bit for the sensation. He asks the void for books, reads them, and gets distracted after a few sentences. Why can't the void select for something that's interesting?

He spent an entire afternoon with Wei Ying and it was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. Wei Ying smiled. Wei Ying chattered on about magical theory and maleficaria and Lan Zhan looked at him with love. Wei Ying, and this is important, did not die because he forgot his room number. 

He's in his room well before curfew. He's hungry, but that doesn't matter. It's not Wei Ying. He performs his evening exercises and he meditates and he runs through the sword forms with Bichen, and he feels the mana accumulating. He knows, somewhere on the juniors' floor, Lan Xichen is doing the same thing, and it makes him feel safe.

Lan Zhan falls asleep immediately at curfew because the Lan clan trains itself to go to sleep instantly at 11pm and wake up without an alarm at 7am. Unlike most of the disciplines, it doesn't collect much mana. But it helps you survive.

Jin Zixun is SO mad that he had to spend ALL afternoon warding a bunch of rooms for the new Shanghai residents even though two of them were OBVIOUSLY going to die, and then Wen Qing told him to ward ANOTHER PERSON'S ROOM even though she was ALSO obviously going to die and maybe he's going to have to ward THREE MORE ROOMS as part of her STUPID PLAN to keep her brother alive. And when he complained to Lan Xichen nothing happened. No one is taking his affinity seriously.

He seethes about this as he falls asleep.

"Good night," he says softly to Meng Yao, and kisses him. They know exactly how long the walk between their rooms takes, and time it so that they can see each other as the last thing they do every night.

(Lan Xichen does his exercises and meditation in the morning. The precepts are important, but in all things it is important to be a little bit flexible.)

He holds his pillow to himself as he goes to sleep, and thinks about how happy he is that his biological brother got to meet his sworn brother, and allows himself to imagine a world where Meng Yao goes to sleep in his arms.

Meng Yao locks his door and says the incantation that he knows he has to say every night to bring his memories back, although of course he has no idea what he wants to cause himself to forget. It's important to be careful, when you're editing your own thoughts. It's very easy to lock things away such that they're gone forever, and that is no good at all. No matter who he's being during the day, he has to spend at least a few minutes every night with all the information.

Ah. Yes. Well, he thinks, as he remembers thinking every night. It makes perfect sense that he wants Lan Xichen's a-Yao not to know that. 

He takes notes on the people he's met during the day-- who will be useful, what leverage he has over them, who he should introduce to whom, what strings he ought to pull-- and casts the spell so he'll remember them. Omniscience can come in very handy.

Meng Yao never controls anyone else's minds, except for practice. Meng Yao doesn't need to.

He can't sleep. 

Every night, back at home, he would sleepily reach out and use a little bit of mana to check where the animals are. Even in the enclave, there were always animals. There were worms in the garden and spiders in the corner of the ceiling and the broken-winged bird that Nie Huaisang had found and cried until someone let him keep it and the rabbit hutch that no one would admit responsibility for but that somehow wound up with food in its bowls twice a day anyway. He'd never admit it to anyone, but the animals made him feel safe. No matter what, there was always something small and warm and okay.

There are no animals in the Scholomance as far as he can reach. The entire place feels like death. 

(He doesn't reach out towards the void. There's no answer there that's comforting.) 

GOD he was STUPID everything he said today was STUPID and he is going to BASH HIS HEAD INTO A PILLOW

Yanli's fibro is acting up. She was brave around Jiang Cheng-- she didn't want to worry him-- but when she returns to her room she twists up into the single contorted position that hurts the least and even so her entire body screams.

Every single night, Yanli thinks of three things she's grateful for. She's acutely aware that each day she lives might be her last, and she wants to make the most of them. So she tries to appreciate each of the little pleasures-- a warm shower when there's a guard so she can have one, her increasing enjoyment of brussels sprouts, a good selection at the vending machine, the satisfaction of mastering a conjugation-- with the knowledge that each time she experiences them might be her last.

She's grateful to see a-Ying and a-Cheng again. She hadn't expected that she'd be able to; it was beyond her wildest dreams. She's grateful that there wasn't a letter from Madame Yu, which would have been unpleasant to read. She's grateful that Wen Qing has found someone to keep Wen Ning safe. 

All things considered, Yanli thinks as she drifts off to sleep, her life could be a lot worse.

Wen Qing goes to bed early so she can study Grey's Anatomy.

She's going to learn MEDICINE!

Wen Ning has two guards. Wen Ning doesn't want two guards. It is very frightening to be part of Shanghai enclave and be more important than other people, the sort of person who has guards who are at least in theory supposed to do what he says, when he's used to being the least important and most ignored person in the entire enclave. 

He doesn't know how he's supposed to interact with people whose job is to keep him safe.

He tries to be very quiet and very obedient and not bother anyone, which he's found is generally a safe solution.

Ayako checks that Julian and Wen Ning are going to their hall together, and then goes back to her room. It's well before curfew; she didn't want to leave it until the last minute. She's thinking about-- scheduling. Scheduling is what she's thinking about, because it's finicky and logistics-y and takes up your whole brain, and all of those are things that you want in a topic to think about before bedtime on your first day in the Scholomance.

The plan was for Mei to take all her classes with her enclavemates; if they're placed in different homerooms she's going to find Mei in the halls to check what their schedules are. She very much hopes Wen Ning will be in the same homeroom as at least one of them so they can get him into their classes too without him at any point being on his own during this process but she can't, actually, control that, so it's not worth worrying about, now is it.

If her classes are in Mandarin that counts for her language credit, but Wen Ning's first language is Mandarin so she should still take a language class so he can copy off her during it-- or maybe that can be a class he takes with Julian? But that adds another name to the list of people she'll need to coordinate homeroom with tomorrow, ugh-- yeah, okay, she can take a language class, she's good enough at languages and tracking down Julian without even knowing which language he's taking his classes in or having a chance to ask at breakfast sounds hellish, this is why she should have remembered that this was going to be an issue and asked at dinner, or, better, while they were still talking to Wen Qing. But that's not something she can do anything about now, so bookmark that thought for later and go back to thinking about scheduling, honestly it's probably a good thing that she's not trying to additionally coordinate with Julian because 'Wen Ning takes a full courseload with me, except for his language class which he takes with you' sounds even more hellish to make work, and now without an actual non-hypothetical schedule to work with she has run clean out of scheduling to consider.

Which leaves other, less finicky, less brain-consuming things. Like wondering whether anyone back home is missing her, and thinking about the enclave cats, and wishing there could be more than one person in a dorm so she wouldn't be risking anything by going and finding Mei right now and talking about something silly and pointless and pretending it's a sleepover and not thinking about how long it's going to be before she sees the sky again, if she ever sees the sky again. The real sky, not in posters or photos or star-print fabric, not the illusion that hangs like a ghost over the gym, not a sketch of a stage set not a drawing not a diagram.

She curls up very small under her blanket and stares at the void; it isn't the same, but if she shuts her eyes very very tightly and then opens them again, the dots of illusory light look just a little bit like stars.

The Scholomance is not a tower. Tomonori would like to live in one, but he knows that's a faraway dream that might never come true. His conversation with Bella was promising, and he hopes to run into her again when he has more to offer. Meanwhile, what Lan Wangji said still stings. Tomonori will just have to find a way to prove to Shanghai that he's capable. At least he went on a very productive supply run with the help of the Montréal enclave, and his conversation with Ayako was helpful for figuring out to how to sell his accomplishments a little better- they're few in number, but it's not nothing. Most freshmen won't have done that much, he thinks.

It's not going to be easy, but Tomonori will just have to work harder to make sure it happens for him. He doesn't want to die. Maybe there are some people out there who could make peace with dying, but he's not one of them. The idea of it would keep him up at night, and that would just put him in more danger. So he doesn't think about it. Except now, in the privacy of his own room, where there's nothing but his own thoughts- he's thinking about what it would feel like. Instead of managing to study like he would have preferred, Tomonori worries himself to sleep. It doesn't even build any mana.

Jinye goes to her room early, with plenty of time still left in the day to work By that point Taipei's already disassembled all the students drawers and one of the Taipei seniors has put up wards, which she hits it with her analysis-spell, just to make sure it isn't booby-trapped. It's mana and she can't afford to keep spending like this but she also can't afford to be murdered, now can she.

The wards are fine. She lays her own wards anyway; they're just detection-spells, but they'll let her know if anything comes murdering.

And then she sits down, at her chair at her now drawerless-desk, with all her books (from the library, not textbooks because she hasn't gotten those yet, but the closest she could find) spread out on the table in front of her. 

Zhang Jinye cannot be a burden on the enclave. She will be, purely by surviving, if she survives, because the price of survival is more than the mana she can generate.

Therefore she must produce enough to pay her own way.

In this, she has one advantage.

She opens the calculus book she got out of the library, and she casts the spell; it is not a simple spell, because it was designed for adults, but it takes her about three percent of the mana it would anyone else, because she is Zhang Jinye, and she has a power sharer that can stretch it as long as she needs it to, so long as she pays it back.

And she inhales the information. Her eyes are flickering down the page and everything it says is slotting neatly into place, and she reads almost as fast as her hands can turn the page. It doesn't take long before she has a headache, and she flips the book shut and flips the next one open and she's going she's going she's riding it her skull is pounding - first few chapters of each book, she'll learn what she needs and she understands it, everything is slotting neatly into place as she learns -

When she's having trouble making her eyes focus she releases the spell, and for the moment there is the blissful feeling of her headache not getting worse, which feels almost like it's getting better.

Then, groaning with the absolute effort, eyes flickering, she stands up.

And begins doing her stretches.

One... and it's hard, it's almost impossible, and the mana is flowing...

Two...

Three...