Someone from the School Labor Committee arrived at the scene in just a minute.
Of course, since the incident was minor, only one person came.
The newcomer was a wizard of about thirty, slightly plump, with thinning hair and puffy eyes. It was hard to tell whether those swollen eyelids were natural or the result of work stress. He wore a crumpled robe with a ring of water stains around its hem, making one wonder whether he had just been chatting with the fishmen in Linzhong Lake.
"It is indeed Qinling Gu Zheng Tu Si."
The wizard pinched off a fine strand with tweezers and, after a simple test, immediately gave a firm conclusion. Yet his voice also betrayed his confusion. "But this rare spider should be a species unique to the Qinling Mountains. There isn't even a population of them in the Silent Forest... How did it suddenly turn up at school?"
As he spoke, he removed the monocle tucked into his eye socket and slipped it into his breast pocket, then took out a small wooden box and gently placed the strand of spider silk inside.
"Could it have escaped from some professor's laboratory?"
Zheng Qing watched his every move and offered his own guess—in fact, it was the most likely explanation, since this sort of "accident" had happened before. One year, several silent monkeys had escaped from a school laboratory, leaving a small patch of woods utterly silent. From students to cats and dogs, from birds in the sky to insects in cracks between rocks, anything that saw one of those monkeys had been forced to endure a Silence Curse.
"Until the investigation results are in, anything is possible." The school worker rubbed the sparse hair on top of his head and cautiously offered his opinion. "After