For the three days after the incident, Star-Signet Academy was quiet in a way that felt wrong.
Classes still ran on schedule, the bells still rang on time; even the teachers who loved dragging their lectures overtime had become suspiciously punctual. Students whispered about the tremor in the Ritual Tower that day, but the moment they saw priests patrolling the corridors, they shut their mouths at once, shrinking back into the shadows like dogs whose tails had been stepped on.
Over those three days, Qi Luo could clearly feel one thing:
—He was being watched.
In class, the classroom clause-chains that usually just went through the motions now lingered over his head every time, swaying a little extra. In the cafeteria line, the moment he picked up a tray, a fine silver thread would flash overhead, as if confirming "target location." Even at night in the baths, he could see a tiny observation stone in one corner of the ceiling flare for a second.
"Did you blow up a temple or something lately?" his roommate muttered, voice low. "Every chain that passes by looks like it's got beef with you."
"Maybe my face just asks for it," Qi Luo answered lazily.
He hadn't told any of his classmates about the "World Recovery Contingency" he'd seen under the Ritual Tower—that wasn't the kind of thing you used as gossip.
But after that day, his name had visibly brightened on certain chains.
Not the ones everyone could see—the "honor student" kind—but those one level higher, written in darker ink.
It felt like someone up above had drawn a very heavy circle around him on some page of some file.
On the third afternoon, the abnormal finally went from "staring" to "reaching out and grabbing."
The notice came in a very ordinary way.
Class had just ended when their homeroom teacher, Han, stayed on the podium and called a few names:
"Qi Luo, Laine, Su Huai—stay behind, you three."
The hallway emptied fast, footsteps fading away until only a few desks and the musty smell of old textbooks remained.
Qi Luo walked to the front. Teacher Han forced a smile that looked like it took effort.
"Don't be nervous, the Safety and Guidance Office just needs to ask you about a few details. Everyone knows already, there was an incident in the Ritual Tower, the Council and the Academy both have procedures to run."
"Teacher." Qi Luo looked at him. "Just the three of us?"
"…For now." Han avoided his eyes. "They said it's a random抽查 based on records."
The word "records" made a chain overhead tremble faintly.
That chain linked straight into the encrypted file on the Ritual Tower incident.
Qi Luo knew he was definitely not in any "random sample." He was the one who had rerouted a World-Scale backlash.
"When do I go?" he asked.
"Now." A figure was already blocking the doorway.
A middle-aged priest in an ink-black robe stood there with two silver-armored deacons at his back. The emblem embroidered on their hems was not the Academy's crest, but the seal of the Covenant Council: a pair of scales encircled by chains.
"Apprentice Qi Luo?" the man lifted his gaze, fixing it on him.
"Yes." Qi Luo turned.
"I am Lian De of the Council's Adjudication Division; Third Bureau," he announced flatly. "By order, I am to conduct a routine review of apprentices involved in the Ritual Tower incident. Please come with us."
"…How long will the review take?" Qi Luo tried to make his voice sound like an ordinary student's fear, not the other kind of tension.
"If everything goes smoothly, a day," Lian De said. "If anomalies related to World-Scale clauses are discovered… the time will depend."
When he said "World-Scale clauses," Teacher Han visibly flinched.
"Can I accompany them?" Han blurted out. "They're still just kids—"
"That won't be necessary." Lian De cut him off politely. "The Academy has already signed cooperation clauses; our procedures will be fully recorded."
In the seams of their sleeves, Qi Luo could see a pale chain: an escort-clause chain.
It was light in color, marked with phrases like "temporary custody," "non-public adjudication," "location: partially screened."
—This wasn't a normal "questioning." It was a route to some adjudication site whose address even the Academy didn't know.
"Can I bring anything?" Qi Luo asked.
"Personal items are fine," Lian De said. "You may not bring any self-made clause carriers."
When he said "clause carriers," his gaze slid, perfectly naturally, to Qi Luo's sleeve—as if he already knew this Rust Street brat had a habit of hiding all sorts of scraps of paper in there.
Qi Luo scooped his textbook and pen into his bag and slung it over his shoulder.
"Let's go," he said with a quick smile. "Might as well walk while I still technically get to do it freely."
Teacher Han opened his mouth, then only sighed. "Be careful."
"You should say that to them," Qi Luo couldn't help muttering back.
Lian De didn't take offense, treating it as a bold student trying to crack a joke.
They stepped out of the classroom.
The instant Qi Luo crossed the threshold, he felt a chain snap tight around him overhead.
[Escort status: initiated.]
A chain stretched out from the Academy's Safety and Guidance mainline, clamping around his neck like a cold collar.
Lian De raised his hand and gave a light tug. The escort chain clicked into his sleeve's adjudication-authority chain.
From that moment on, in the language of clauses, Qi Luo was already defined as "under escort for adjudication."
—Just one door away from "Secret Adjudication."
They didn't leave the Academy right away.
By procedure, the Safety and Guidance building had to grind through a whole stack of annoying steps—confirm identity, confirm the escort clause was properly registered, confirm the Academy representative had signed off.
Qi Luo was parked in a small room to wait, while outside, chains layered over chains ran checks.
The window gave him half a view of the sports field.
In the afternoon sun, students chased a ball back and forth.
He watched them through the glass for a while, then suddenly realized something: if he went out that gate with Lian De today, the odds of him ever standing at a window like this again, watching people kick a ball like idiots, were very low.
He'd always known that sooner or later he'd slam into World-Scale clauses head-on.
He just thought that day would be a bit later—at least after he'd figured out the Forbidden Sigil on his chest, after he'd read half a sentence of that World Recovery Contingency.
Instead, it had arrived early.
"Kind of unwilling," he told himself.
"Then don't just go quietly." A voice popped up in his head at a very unhelpful moment.
Not someone outside. A deeper memory—the way Garth had looked at him in the old reservoir, like a man watching his own kid.
"If you let them take you now," Garth had said, "then that gap we tore open that night… we tore it for nothing."
The rustle of chains outside the door was getting closer.
Qi Luo drew his gaze back from the sports field and looked down at his hand.
This hand had scribbled and tampered with plenty of clauses, but it had never written "refuse escort" on itself.
"If I stand up now and jump out the window?" Qi Luo calculated calmly. "The escort chain will snap tight on the spot and drag me right back onto the route."
He glanced up.
The escort chain was anchored to the official "transfer clauses" between the Academy and the Council. It was one of the most stable lines in the city, used every day to move people between institutions.
Trying to brute-force that chain would mean branding himself "anomaly" in public and directly tripping World-Scale supervision.
"Then I'll just have to…" Qi Luo narrowed his eyes, "avoid moving the 'person.'"
Not touch the "person" part. Aim for the "record."
There was a knock.
The door opened—not to Lian De, but Teacher Han.
"There are two more forms," he said, holding a stack of papers. "By regulation you have to sign confirmation that you understand the escort clauses."
"Teacher has to go through the procedure too?" Qi Luo stood up.
"Academy representative." Han gave a bitter little smile.
Qi Luo took the papers.
They were full of boilerplate:
[I, Qi Luo, have carefully read and understood the contents of the escort clauses for this adjudication, including but not limited to my rights and obligations during escort, the possible scope of clause inspections, and the handling methods in case of accidents during escort.]
There were a few small clauses printed beneath. They all looked proper:
[During escort, physical safety shall be the responsibility of the Council's Adjudication Division.]
[During escort, clause inspection scope shall include the Basic Covenant and clauses directly relevant to the incident.]
[In the event of an unavoidable accident resulting in the death of the escorted party, the remains shall be handled according to customary practices of the person's place of origin.]
The last one was printed in very faint ink, like a throwaway afterthought.
Rust Street had only one "customary practice" for that: dump.
Or, if you were being polite—"returned to original district for local handling."
Qi Luo's finger paused on that line.
"Teacher," he looked up, "did the Academy draft this?"
"No," Han lowered his voice, "it's a standard template brought by the adjudication group. Don't start digging holes in the clauses again… this time, say as little as you can."
"Teacher." Qi Luo suddenly looked at him very seriously. "Do you believe they'll 'guarantee my physical safety'?"
Han was silent for a moment. "I believe… the clauses will keep the account."
"Keep the account?" Qi Luo smiled. "Good."
He turned the paper at a slight angle so that Han couldn't easily see, but he could.
Overhead, the escort chain tightened a fraction.
Out in the hallway, Lian De called, "Are you done?"
"Almost," Han answered quietly. "He's still reading."
Qi Luo knew this was his last window.
—He had to work on the escort clauses themselves.
He picked up the pen and wrote his name.
The moment the characters for "Qi Luo" landed, he felt the escort chain snap onto his name, starting to drag his "person" down the line toward the Council.
At the same time, his awareness climbed that escort chain, feeling its way up to a particular segment:
[In the event of an unavoidable accident resulting in the death of the escorted party, the remains shall be handled according to customary practices of the person's place of origin.]
That line was originally just a tiny "aftercare note," hanging under "escort accident handling." A cold little branch that quietly executed itself when no one was watching.
"If you die during escort," Qi Luo translated in his head, "your corpse gets sent back to Rust Street."
—Corpse repatriation.
He had no desire to die.
But clauses only cared about text.
If a chain could be made to recognize that "Qi Luo" had died during escort, then the "corpse repatriation" would kick in on its own.
And the status of the name "Qi Luo" in the clause books would shift from "living person under adjudication" to "deceased pending case closure."
"Dead men's cases," Qi Luo thought, "have a way of getting shelved."
Especially in those Council departments that loved dragging files out.
He drew a breath and quietly added a few words after that line.
On paper, it just made the sentence a bit more long-winded:
[…the remains shall be handled according to customary practices of the person's place of origin, and the fact of death shall be immediately synchronized into the escorted party's Basic Covenant record, in order to terminate all subsequent adjudication and escort obligations.]
"Immediately synchronized into the Basic Covenant record." "Terminate all subsequent adjudication and escort obligations."
Those few little phrases were needles, slipping into the escort chain's structure.
The system took less than a second to decide: this was a note appended to "accident handling," referencing the higher chains for "Basic Covenant records" and "adjudication obligations."
Logically, it simply emphasized something already reasonable: if someone was dead, there was nothing left to adjudicate.
The escort chain accepted the additions without raising an alarm.
Qi Luo set the pen down and smiled at Han. "Done."
Han couldn't see what he'd added. All he saw was that the name was signed, and he let out a breath.
"Don't be too sharp," he whispered. "Even just with your mouth."
Qi Luo murmured assent and handed the paper back.
He had no idea whether someone outside was reaching a hand in to help him—but he knew that this little footnote had at least opened one possible path.
—A path into "the world of the dead."
The escort started in proper form.
Qi Luo was led out of the Safety and Guidance building and through several checkpoints.
All along the way, he could see students watching from a distance, their eyes a mix of curiosity and relief—relief that they weren't the ones being led away on a chain.
At the school gate, a closed carriage bearing the Council's mark waited.
Silver chains were wrapped around its sides, etched with "escort," "isolation," "anti-conflict," and the like.
The escort chain tugged him toward the carriage.
Lian De went ahead, taking out a recording stone and flashing it between Qi Luo and the carriage door—that was the "starting point log" for the escort procedure.
"Get in," Lian De said curtly.
Qi Luo had just lifted his foot when a lazy voice drifted over from the side.
"Well now, what's with all the commotion?"
As the man spoke, a very unremarkable little chain flickered in Qi Luo's field of view.
Qi Luo turned his head.
In a corner by the iron gate that should have been empty, a figure had appeared at some point—wearing the gray-blue jacket of an Academy grounds worker, hair sticking up like he'd just crawled out of a furnace, a bag of fresh trash dangling from his hand.
Garth.
He shouldn't have been here.
Normally his range was the lower Rust Street; on a good day he might sneak into the mid-layers disguised as a "porter." But a public, chain-crowded place like this? Showing up was like lighting incense on the Adjudication Division's nose.
Lian De saw him too.
"Maintenance?" Lian De frowned. "This area is sealed. Non-escort personnel, clear out."
"Clearing, clearing." Garth stepped aside with a grin, speaking around the unlit cigarette between his teeth. "Just dropping a reminder—the oil drums over there are leaking. If you don't clean it up, it blows, that's on your Safety Office."
He jerked his thumb toward the other side of the gate.
Lian De's reflexes made him glance that way.
In that instant, the Forbidden Sigil in Qi Luo's chest flared hot.
A chain from below, reeking of damp and rust, shot up from under the iron fence, fine as a sewing needle.
That was a Rust Street black market specialty—an underground notification chain used to smuggle messages between levels.
"—We're ready."
A voice that sounded nothing like a priest's flicked through Qi Luo's bones.
Rosh.
Qi Luo's heart clenched.
"Now?" he asked silently.
"Now," the voice said. "You only get the window once."
There was no time to ask "why now" or "what's the plan."
The escort chain was tightening around his throat. Lian De turned back, about to urge him into the carriage.
—And at that moment, every chain near the gate shivered at once.
Not like the world-splitting roar from the Ritual Tower, but a small disturbance you heard all the time in back alleys—a "fuel safety clause" somewhere nearby had just been broken.
From the direction Garth had pointed, an explosion boomed.
Boom.
The oil drum had indeed gone up.
Flame and thick smoke punched into the air on the other side of the gate, snatching every eye.
The gate priests spun on instinct, triggering "extinguish" and "isolate" clauses. Lian De's sleeve chains twitched toward the blast as well—he was obligated to verify it wasn't a manufactured distraction.
For a moment, the escort chain around Qi Luo's neck slackened—not physically, but in focus. Its detection weight shifted toward the accident.
It was enough.
The thin chain from underground lunged.
It didn't stab the escort chain. It stabbed something else—
A tiny chain-end buried deep in Qi Luo's chest that no one normally saw.
[Survival-status record.]
That segment was part of every Basic Covenant: next to each name, a tiny note that said "alive" or "dead." It almost never got mentioned—unless the "death certification" program ran.
The instant the needle-thin chain pierced it, that little chain flared.
Qi Luo convulsed, his vision going black.
In the clause-sight, his "survival status" node was twisted in an unbelievable way, as if someone were forcing it from the "alive" side to the "dead" side.
Normally, only a few things had the right to do that: certain high-ranking gods, battlefield judicial clauses, World-Scale recovery programs—or—
Some very old "battle-death confirmation covenant."
The chain from underground bore a few archaic characters:
[War-God Sworn; Fallen-in-battle Registry · abbreviated form.]
The Fallen Knights' oldest friend on the front.
The battle-death confirmation covenant existed to quickly confirm whether someone was "dead enough" amidst a chaotic battlefield, so compensation and the release of debts and service obligations could be processed.
Now, this old covenant they'd stolen was being jammed straight into Qi Luo's Basic Covenant survival record.
"Fallen," Rosh said coldly in his bones.
The survival node lurched, like a hand had shoved it.
[Status: Alive → Fallen in battle (pending confirmation).]
The escort chain reacted at once.
[Detected: escort target survival status changed.]
[Invoking: escort accident-handling clauses.]
The little footnote Qi Luo had written woke right on cue:
[…the remains shall be handled according to customary practices of the person's place of origin, and the fact of death shall be immediately synchronized into the escorted party's Basic Covenant record, in order to terminate all subsequent adjudication and escort obligations.]
The words "fact of death" lit up along the chain.
A tiny bridge formed between the escort chain and the Basic Covenant chains. The system started verifying whether Qi Luo was, in fact, "dead."
By rights, that check should have failed.
He was clearly still standing at the gate, very much alive.
But the checking chain reached in and immediately hit that patch of black fog.
The old smoke already spread across his Basic Covenant in that area—the same black mist that had been there long before today—hung over the survival record like a curtain.
The checking chain felt around inside and found only two characters:
[Fallen.]
The "(pending confirmation)" in parentheses had been blurred out under the fog.
To the checker, the only knowable fact was: this name was marked "fallen in battle" in some unknown War-God system.
"…Verification failed," the escort chain's judgment module stuttered. "Status read error."
When confronted with unreadable data, a lot of clauses followed a "conservative principle."
For escort accidents, the conservative choice was "treat as dead."
Because if an accident happened mid-escort, the responsibility chains would rather land on "escorters failed to keep the escorted safe" than take on an extra "kept dragging a dead man like he was alive."
So after a brief hesitation, it handed down:
[Escort accident: escorted party deceased (status record abnormal, fallen in battle confirmed).]
[Executing: terminate current escort and all subsequent adjudication obligations; return remains according to place-of-origin practices.]
The chain around Qi Luo's neck slackened abruptly.
Lian De reached for it by instinct and found his grip sliding through water.
For a second his sight blurred; in the clause-view, the name "Qi Luo" jumped from the "in custody" column of the escort roster to "accident handling."
One line lower, it was already under "deceased awaiting return."
"—What?" Lian De's face changed.
He started to trigger manual re-checks—
—And the second explosion went off at the oil drum site.
Not fire this time, but some old pipe bursting under pressure.
"Someone's hurt!" someone shouted. "Over here—!"
Safety clauses surged that way in a flood, tugging Lian De's focus clean away again.
Qi Luo stood at the center of all this, his body pulled between two forces—
One up, from the escort chain and the battle-death covenant working in strange tandem.
One down, from the rusty chain underground, smelling of tides and iron, tugging his spirit toward Rust Street.
His vision went black.
In the last second before he passed out, he heard Garth swearing, very close.
"Shit, you're slow."
Then someone grabbed him sideways and hauled him away.
In the clause-sight, a cold little note appeared beside the name "Qi Luo":
[Status: Deceased (exile zone: Rust Street).]
When he woke up, his back was on wood—not stone, not his dorm bed—a plank that rocked under him.
The stink under his nose was rotting cloth, candle wax, and a faint trace of blood.
Wheels rumbled beside his ears, rolling over uneven ground.
"…He's awake," someone said, punctuating it with a kick.
Qi Luo opened his eyes.
He was lying in a battered corpse-cart. Dirty canvas was spread under him, stained with questionable fluids; empty wooden coffins were scattered around.
"Don't move around." Garth's voice came from outside the cart. "On the chains you're dead as can be. If you twitch too much, you'll scare the pedestrians."
Qi Luo pushed himself up a little. His chest still felt icy.
"Did it work?" he asked, throat dry.
"Barely," Rosh's voice came from the other side. "The black fog on your Basic Chains is nastier than we thought."
"We pulled toward 'fallen in battle,' it pulled toward 'recovered,'" the female knight said with a cold snort. "Almost tore you in half."
Qi Luo coughed. "The escort chain?"
"Ran two laps around that little footnote you wrote," Garth said. "In the end, it politely decided you 'died en route,' and obediently executed 'corpse repatriation.'"
"Right now, we are that 'repatriation,'" Rosh rapped the cart wall with a stick. "If the Council types feel like checking, they'll find you got transferred to Rust Street. As for which alley your corpse got 'intercepted' on the way… that's an under-level problem."
Qi Luo suddenly felt like laughing.
"Feigned death and exile," he said under his breath.
"Sounds poetic," the female knight sniffed. "In practice it just means—on their ledgers, you died; on ours, you're alive."
Qi Luo closed his eyes. He could feel the escort chain sliding fully off him, replaced by a rougher, rust-scented line curling around his waist.
Rust Street's residency chain.
In the clauses, he was no longer "Star-Signet Academy Covenant Department freshman · Qi Luo," just something stripped down to the barest record:
[Rust Street resident · Qi Luo: status—deceased.]
"From now on," Rosh said, "even if you go back to the Academy, you'll only do it as someone who's not on their rosters."
"Someone off the books…" Qi Luo murmured.
Nameless.
The word surfaced in his mind.
"Didn't you always say you wanted to open a firm that only takes gods and border-cases?" Garth drawled. "Then take this as your official exile. You died out of their rosters, now you can live on the lower blacklists."
"Nameless Firm," the female knight chuckled. "Sounds creepy as hell."
The wheels kept grinding over Rust Street's broken road.
Through a slit in the curtain, familiar fog and neon glowed.
Lying on the boards, Qi Luo felt his Forbidden Sigil bump softly against his chest with each jolt—as if checking he was still there, as if adjusting to his new status as "dead."
"Will the Council buy it?" he couldn't help asking.
"For a while," Garth said. "Their monitoring chains won't punch through that black fog any time soon. All they'll see is 'fallen in battle.'"
"And long term?" Qi Luo asked.
"Long term…" Rosh paused. "We'll see who loses patience first."
The corpse-cart rattled into a narrower alley and finally stopped before a rusted iron door.
Big characters had been spray-painted across it: Scrap & Salvage.
Garth flipped the curtain back and hopped down.
"We're here, corpse," he said. "Off."
Qi Luo slid off the plank.
The moment his feet hit the ground, a chain beside him chimed softly—Rust Street's own turf-clauses registering that "one more officially recognized corpse" had arrived and writing a line somewhere unseen.
[Newly added death today: Rust Street resident · Qi Luo.]
"Welcome home," the female knight clapped his shoulder. "From today on, you've died once on the world's books."
"The next time your name gets written in," Garth said, "you'll have to do it yourself."
Meanwhile, high above in a black-stone chamber, several gray-robed High Seats of the Council were leafing through a slim report.
"Escort accident report," one read lazily. "Qi Luo—status anomaly during escort, misjudged fallen in battle by War-God legacy system, escort terminated, remains returned to Rust Street."
"War-God legacy system?" another frowned. "Wasn't that shut down ages ago?"
"The Rust Street remnants still have scraps of chain left," someone sneered. "Minor provincial anomalies aren't worth digging through old logs."
"But he's on the Secret Adjudication roster," the older one at the table tapped the report. "The World Base-Covenant just circled his name."
"So what if it did?" the first man flicked the pages. "To a mortal already recorded as 'deceased' in the Basic Covenant, the Contingency won't move much."
"…You mean?" someone asked.
"Close this as death, for now." He shut the file. "If it's a fake, the Hunters will sniff it out. No need for us to tear into that black fog personally."
Silence hung for a moment.
In the end, someone lifted a pen and wrote a few small lines on the margin:
[Qi Luo: status—deceased (pending verification).]
[Directive: Covenant Hunter outpost to verify the fact of death; procedure level—Secret Adjudication auxiliary investigation.]
At the Hunters' outpost, Ruan Ji was buried in a thicket of chain diagrams when someone knocked twice.
"Come in," she said without looking up.
A figure in a dark gray Hunter cloak stepped in, a fresh command ring hanging from his sleeve chain.
"From upstairs," he said, handing it over. "That kid on the roster—he's dead."
Ruan Ji froze for half a beat.
She caught the ring. Text floated up in her chain-sight:
[Subject: Qi Luo.]
[Status: fallen in battle during escort, remains returned.]
[Suspicion: Basic Covenant record obscured; War-God battle-death system officially decommissioned.]
[Directive: Hunter Ruan Ji to secretly verify the fact of death. If fabrication discovered, track all involved parties and clause vulnerabilities.]
"Faked death…" Ruan Ji's lips curved slightly.
She clipped the ring onto her own black chain.
The metal chimed once.
"Interesting," she murmured. "You died on the clauses, Qi Luo."
"Let's see," she said, "just how many places this 'dead man' can still leave living footprints."