Chapter 29 - A Soul That Refuses to Stay Sterile

The next morning, Yogyakarta's characteristic cool air settled over the conservatory's music complex. Inside the main practice room, with its high acoustic ceilings, rows of teak wood chairs stood arranged neatly beneath the glow of a large hanging chandelier. In front of a glossy black grand piano, Michi sat with her spine straight, her fingers hovering above the cold ivory keys.

Her supervising professor—a rigid-faced senior lecturer wearing horn-rimmed glasses—stood near the corner of the room with his arms folded across his chest. "Begin, Arunika. Chopin's fourth piece from the repertoire. Keep the tempo steady, follow the original score's dynamics exactly. No wild improvisation that compromises the purity of the work."

Under normal circumstances, an absolute instruction like that would have immediately snapped Michi into "machine mode"—playing the classical notes with sterile, flawless precision, purely to satisfy her mentor's expectations. But today, something different stirred inside her chest. There was a wild pulse reminiscent of Jefri's drumbeats, a raw chord progression that felt like something Rimba would have written, and, most importantly of all: there was a courage that belonged entirely to her.

The moment her fingers pressed down on the first key, the music that emerged no longer sounded rigid like some tempo-measuring robot. Michi let her emotions flow freely, pressing harder into the climactic sections, slowing the rhythm in places that demanded room to breathe. She wasn't destroying Chopin's work; she was bringing it to life with blood, sweat, and the honest feeling she had only just discovered within herself.

Crack.

The professor's hand shot up at once, halting her playing with a sharp rap of his small baton against the desk. The atmosphere in the practice room froze instantly, as if all the oxygen had been sucked straight up into the room's high ceiling. Several students in the back row held their breath, staring at Michi's back with a mixture of disbelief. Michiko Arunika Suryokusumo had, until now, always been the symbol of absolute obedience—the revolving trophy who followed every rigid rule of tempo and standardized dynamics without ever uttering a single word of objection.

The professor looked at her, jaw set hard, his fingers tapping the small baton against the wooden desk in a rapid rhythm that reflected simmering fury. "You are gambling with your own future, Arunika," the old man's voice dropped low, thick with a veiled, cutting threat. "The Vienna scholarship committee isn't looking for an artist trying to experiment with street-level emotion. They're looking for precision, discipline, and the absolute purity of European tradition. If you play like that in front of an international panel of judges, that letter of recommendation will be pulled in a matter of seconds."

Michi didn't bow her head. For the first time in her life, her gaze didn't waver under the weight of the academic authority that had always been her golden cage. She straightened the score sheet on the piano's rack with a calm, graceful motion.

"If the purity they're looking for means playing without a soul, like some mechanical doll, then maybe that place was never meant for me," Michi said, her voice quiet but resolute, echoing off the room's acoustic walls. She closed the fallboard over the piano's keys with a firm, decisive click, rose from her wooden chair, and walked out of the room without a single glance back at the professor, whose face had gone red holding back his fury.

Her footsteps carried her out through the main door toward the conservatory's grand, pillared corridor. The afternoon air blew soft and gentle, carrying the damp scent of leftover rain from the central courtyard garden. But before she could even draw a long breath to savor the new freedom she had just seized for herself, a well-built young man with a backpack slung over one shoulder was already standing there, leaning against a colonial-style pillar, waiting for her with both arms folded across his chest.

Bayu.

Her younger brother studied Michi with a calculating look, strikingly similar to their father's expression whenever he analyzed some complicated situation. There was no smile on her brother's face—only an analytical calm that concealed a small storm brewing right underneath it.

"Impressive," Bayu called out flatly as Michi approached, his voice cutting through the corridor's silence. "Just last night you were talking to Father about taking the scholarship on your own terms, and now you've already got the whole faculty buzzing over declaring 'open war' on Professor Hans."

Michi stopped walking, giving her brother a look with one eyebrow raised. "Are you following me around now?"

"I don't need to follow you around when your every move's already the main topic of gossip in the cafeteria since the first break this morning," Bayu shot back calmly, stepping closer to his sister with a probing gaze that cut straight through her outermost defenses. "And honestly, Kak... this drastic change of yours has me half worried to death. Not just because of the whole Vienna situation, but because I know exactly who's responsible for turning your entire standard of living upside down like this."

Michi fell silent, her breath catching slightly as her brother's eyes bore straight into hers, making it clear that Bayu already knew far more than he was letting on at the surface—and that a meeting between her brother and Rimba, down in the basement studio, now seemed entirely unavoidable.

The two of them stood there a moment longer in the quiet corridor, Michi searching Bayu's face for some sign of the teasing he usually wrapped around even his most pointed observations, and finding none of it today. Whatever he actually knew, he was choosing, for now, to hold it close rather than spend it all at once—and something about that restraint unsettled her more than an outright confrontation would have. She had spent years being the one who read every room before anyone else could read her. It was strange, and not entirely comfortable, to realize her own brother might be doing exactly the same thing to her now.