The morning after the expedition, the academy felt different.
The corridors were the same, the seminar rooms were the same, the view from the residential block's eastern windows was the same angled shot of Celestial City's skyline that it had been since Lin Yi arrived. But the atmosphere had changed in the specific way it does when a group of people have all done something together and are now in the process of figuring out what it meant.
Students moved through the morning with the particular energy of people who were both tired and recalibrated. Conversations in the corridors were louder than they had been the previous week, the kind of loud that comes from having things to compare and argue about. Expedition results. Monster encounters. Who had done what, in which sector, with which team, and what it had produced.
Lin Yi walked to his morning seminar through the main corridor and ignored most of it.
