The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 58: First Day

The academy gate was the kind of gate designed to communicate something before you walked through it.

It worked.

The stone was older than anything else visible from the outside, old enough that the rest of the academy seemed to have been built around it. Above the arch, the empire’s oldest academic seal, predating the current dynasty by centuries.

Through the gate, the main path led straight to the central tower. Students moved along it in both directions. Second- and third-years, identifiable by the crests on their uniforms, walked without checking the signs. First-years slowed at every intersection, quietly comparing the campus in front of them to the map they had memorized.

Three of them stood in a cluster near the inner wall, intake packets out, arguing about which direction the dormitory wing faced. One of them caught me looking and straightened as if I had said something critical.

I kept walking.

The intake desk was twenty meters inside the gate, staffed by two administrators with the expressions of people who had been doing this for a week and had run out of nervous about it.

I gave my name.

"House Amagi. Examination track, general. Dormitory allocation, single." A pause. "Companion registrations, two."

He checked the secondary ledger. Then the tertiary one.

"Spirit Contractor, independent track." He looked up. "And the second companion."

"Unclassified," I said.

He made a note in the manner of a man adding something to a list that was already too long.

Tessira was processed quickly. Spirit Contractors had their own intake process, a separate examiner, a separate practical. She was directed left. She went.

Anastasia’s registration took longer.

The administrator asked her family name. She gave one that produced no recognition from either administrator. He asked her prior institution. She said she had not attended one. He asked her classification.

"Unknown," she said.

"Unknown is not a classification category," he said.

"I understand that," she said. "Nevertheless."

He made a note. Then another. Then he consulted with his colleague. Then he gave Anastasia a separate intake form with three additional pages and directed her to a side room.

She went without concern.

He watched her go, then looked at me.

"Is she always like that," he said.

"Yes," I said.

He stamped my intake packet.

The dormitory building was a ten-minute walk from the intake gate, long enough to pass the training pavilion, the outer library, and the edge of the Crescent. Already busy at this hour. Students who had been here longer moved through it without looking at anything.

The dormitory corridor was loud with the sounds of twenty people unpacking in adjacent rooms simultaneously. Doors open, trunks scraping across stone, someone arguing about window allocation three rooms down.

I reached my door. Opened it.

The door to my left opened at the same moment.

A third-year, from the crest on his collar. He looked at my face, then at the Amagi crest on my trunk.

He closed his door.

A moment later the lock engaged.

I set the trunk against the wall and looked at the room.

Adequate. Desk, window facing the secondary courtyard, wardrobe built into the wall, the mana-resistant floor panel in the corner that the senior wing rooms came with. Adequate was fine. I had trained in a cave.

Anastasia appeared in the doorway behind me.

She looked at the room. Then at the window. Then at the courtyard outside, where three students were sitting near the fountain, talking the way people talked when they owned a spot.

"This is ours," she said.

"Yes," I said.

She walked to the window and stood there.

"There are more people here than I expected," she said.

"Five hundred enrolled students. Plus faculty and staff."

"Five hundred." She filed it away. "And they all live here."

"In the buildings. Yes."

She watched the three students at the fountain for a moment.

"They know each other already," she said.

"Returning students."

"I see." She turned from the window. "The library. You said it closes at the tenth bell."

"Yes."

"We have time," she said.

"We have time," I said.