After the fifth plate, the classroom stayed quiet for two days.
It was not that there was no sound. Kiyo still complained before morning lessons that breakfast was too small, Morita Yu still lined up his pens in a straight row, and Zhen Shu still instinctively glanced at the cracked plate whenever he passed the sink. But it was as if a thin sheet of paper had been pressed over those sounds. Before anyone spoke, they would first wonder: Was this something I saw, or something I guessed?
Che felt that thin sheet was useful, and exhausting.
If people weighed every word before speaking, life would become like the scale pans in a ninja tool shop. Yet this was exactly what ninjas had to learn. Before throwing a shuriken, they had to know its weight; before passing on information, they also had to know its weight. One struck wooden targets. The other struck people.
On the afternoon of the third day, Mine came to observe.
She stood at the back of the classroom without a clipboard, holding only a roll of pale cloth-bound notes. Takuya offered little introduction, merely saying that today they would practice reciting basic hand seals. Basic hand seal recitation meant that the teacher made half a gesture and the students described only the part they had seen, without completing it. This exercise was harder for Che than the previous days. His mind automatically filled in the rest.
The moment Takuya brought his fingers together, Che knew which seal would follow; the instant his wrist turned, Che could guess how the chakra should flow. But he could not give the complete answer. He could only say, "I saw the index and middle fingers come together, the thumb did not press down, and the wrist turned inward." It