Night always came a little earlier to Rust Street than it did to the Academy.
Up above, the lights hadn't fully dimmed yet, but down below, the fog had already flooded the mouths of the pipes in advance, like a filthy blanket that never quite dispersed, smothering this piece of city the world preferred to forget.
By the time Qi Luo stepped out through the "Scrap & Salvage" iron door, the glow overhead had already slanted into orange-red. Neon signs buzzed and crackled along the street, only half their characters still lit—just enough to make out "bar," "night stall," "repairs," and the like.
"Go take a walk on your own first." Garth leaned against the doorframe, that eternally unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. "We've got some 'war leftovers' to deal with."
Those "war leftovers" obviously weren't a few chunks of scrap iron, but that battle-death remnant chain—the one they'd just used to trick the escort clauses and kill him once on the world's ledgers.
"Don't go too far from Rust Street today," the female knight called from inside. "Your 'corpse' has only just come back a few hours. The ones watching the rosters are definitely going to take a look."
"If they can spot anything, I'll give it to 'em," Rosh added.
Qi Luo nodded and hitched his old shoulder bag higher.
"I'll go walk it off," he said.
"If you wander to that old pipe entrance, don't go too deep," Garth flicked him a glance. "We haven't finished reading all the clauses down there either."
"Got it."
Qi Luo pulled the door shut.
The iron door closed behind him with a heavy thunk, cutting off half the street noise.
The alley was narrow, patched iron plates slapped down over old holes one after another. He followed his memory eastward, skirting a wall of half-burned slogans, hopping over a cracked drainage ditch, until he stopped under an abandoned water tower.
This was one of Rust Street's closest edges to the city wall.
That pipe back then had run in from right here.
The water tower sat atop a half-collapsed support platform. Beneath it, a twisted length of metal pipe jutted out, most of its outer shell already stripped away, leaving only a rusted skeleton.
Someone had roughly sealed the mouth of the pipe over with scrap steel. Big, coarse black characters were painted across it:
[DANGER · KEEP OUT]
Beneath, someone had carved two lines of sloppy small script with a knife:
[Danger is fun]
[→ Watch out, chains bite]
Qi Luo bent down and slipped in through the spots someone had deliberately pried loose.
For ordinary Rust Street folk, this was just a "place they say has ghosts." For him, it was where his memory started: wet, cold, dark—and chains.
The moment he stepped into the pipe, the outside noise dropped away.
Only water drips and the distant, muffled hum of machinery remained.
The Forbidden Sigil in his chest warmed as he crossed the threshold, like it had returned to the place of its birth—restless, prickling with recognition.
"Quiet," Qi Luo murmured. "I'm just looking."
The heat pulled back a little.
The pipe felt narrower than he remembered. Maybe years of rust had thickened the walls. He brushed his fingers along the metal; powder smeared off onto his fingertips, stinging with metallic tang—and a faint… ink scent.
He raised his hand and switched to chain-sight.
It wasn't ordinary rust, but the charred residue of clauses—clause ash.
When sentences were ripped off the Covenant Chains and branded onto matter by force, they left behind this kind of powder—half clause, half cinder.
"This is where they picked me up." Qi Luo walked on and replayed the fragments Garth would only talk about after too much drink. "They broke the Iron Law of the Night Bell, came into the pipe, and dug out a baby covered in Forbidden Sigils."
Back then, there was no way he could understand what was happening.
Now, his eyes and his mind were no longer those of a hoarse, wailing bundle.
The pipe forked ahead.
One branch slanted up, toward a blocked drainage grate. Another went down, angling into the dark—the way Garth's group had gone that night.
Qi Luo chose the downward path.
The deeper he went, the wetter the air.
A thin film of water coated the floor; his steps squeaked softly through it. Here and there were bits of trash dropped from upper levels—scraps of paper, burnt-out talisman slips, incense sticks tossed away before they went out.
There were more chains here.
He looked up. The "ceiling" wasn't just metal; it was rings upon rings of old Covenant Chains wrapped around the pipe.
Most of them were dead. Their color had gone dull, their text blurred. Only a few nodes still glowed faintly.
Some read "Old City Drainage Administration." Others: "Cataclysm Protection · Decommissioned." A few bore ancient characters he didn't recognize—relics from before Skycast City was founded, maybe.
Farther on, the pipe suddenly opened.
There was a hollow space ahead, like someone had dug it out.
Qi Luo stopped at the edge.
This was his first time seeing this place with an adult's eyes.
As a baby wrapped in rags, he'd just been something Garth hauled out from a pile of junk, crying too hard to open his eyes. Later, when he could walk, the Fallen Knights never let him near this place; they said it "bit."
Now, he finally stepped into the center.
The clearing was about as big as a small chapel. The surrounding pipe walls had been smashed open in multiple spots, exposing a tangle of structures behind—stone, metal, and some ancient material that looked disturbingly like bone.
The most conspicuous thing was a ring-shaped structure.
A circle three or four meters across was carved into the floor, made of countless thin grooves. Something had once been inlaid along those grooves; only half-broken fragments remained now—like rune-plates that had been dug out, or chain-links snapped in half.
There was a pit in the center.
That was where they'd carried him out of.
Qi Luo stood at the lip of the pit, staring into the dim hollow.
The Forbidden Sigil pounding in his chest kicked up another notch.
He crouched and ran his fingers along the wall of the pit.
Shallow notches ringed the stone in layered bands. They were too regular to be natural erosion; someone had carved them deliberately with a tool.
In chain-sight, those notches shimmered with the thinnest traces of light: echoes of old clauses.
[World roll…]
[…coven…]
[…terminate…]
Isolated characters, broken beyond any hope of reading a full sentence—but the chill they carried was instinctive.
Qi Luo's fingers slid slowly higher along the wall.
The higher he went, the newer the cuts looked; the letters grew clearer—until one ring of text lit up with a word he'd now seen many times:
[Rollback.]
World Rollback Covenant.
The four characters here had been carved with more force than the rest. The edges were rough, like whoever carved them hadn't been calm.
Qi Luo's touch halted on that band.
He shut his eyes, silently repeated the characters, then opened them again and took in the entire ring structure.
This wasn't just a "ritual circle." It looked more like a gigantic piece of clause machinery—a physical engine that had once dragged some portion of the World Rollback Covenant out of chain-space and bolted it into the city's foundations.
The grooves forming the circle weren't decoration.
In his mind, the models of chain structure snapped into place over them.
Those grooves should have corresponded to "parameters" on the chain: target world, rollback scope, time coordinates, contingency conditions…
Now they'd all been dug out, leaving an empty shell.
"Who stripped it?" Qi Luo whispered.
"We were only told to pull you out of here."
The answer echoed from memory—a few half-drunken words from Garth at some old table. Their squad had just been the retrieval team for "the key." The actual machine that drove the world rollback had only ever appeared in orders a few levels above them.
Now, it was clearly gutted, buried under Rust Street.
"Something this important, tossed in the lower layers?" Qi Luo narrowed his eyes. "Or… is this just the husk that got thrown away?"
He straightened and looked around.
Beyond the circle in the floor, there were "mechanical cavities" punched into the pipe walls.
Some were empty. Others still held half-rings of gear-like runic components. The letters along the teeth were almost completely eroded; he could only just make out roots like "sync," "write-back," "erase."
"Runic machinery," Qi Luo decided.
It was the world's early favorite kind of "clause-assist device"—using mechanical structures to execute abstract clauses, taking some of the strain off the gods. As chain-tech improved, most of it had been retired or hidden.
Here, it had obviously been disassembled halfway—and then abandoned.
A lot of the ports were still intact, as if waiting for someone to plug something new in.
Qi Luo tracked an unbroken length of conduit with his eyes.
It ran from the edge of the circle to an unremarkable iron box in a corner of the wall. The box was half-buried in dirt, its lid cracked open a sliver.
He reached out and pried it up.
Cold air spilled out, smelling of old ink.
Inside weren't gears, but stacks of papers sealed together with moisture-warding sigils.
More precisely, covenant scraps.
Some only half pages, some charred at the corners. Most of the writing had faded, but in chain-sight they still glowed weakly.
Qi Luo plucked the top sheet free.
Old theological script sprawled across it:
[…Draft proposal on revising the Basic Covenant of Skycast City.]
[…The "Eternal Obedience" clause must be given exception conditions, allowing necessary mortal intervention before the World Rollback Covenant is triggered.]
[…Proposal to appoint a "temporary administrator," whose name may be written in and deleted at any time, responsible for manual adjustments during contingency execution.]
Qi Luo's breath hitched.
Temporary administrator.
Name may be deleted at any time.
The phrases hit like a block of ice from crown to chest.
He thought of that night, the line he had helped the world write—this name may be erased at any time.
—So that hadn't been his "stroke of genius."
It had been someone's role on the draft table from the very start.
"…So you were always meant to be like this," the Forbidden Sigil seemed to murmur in his bones. "Always meant to be written as a 'deletable administrator.'"
Qi Luo set that sheet aside and took the next.
This one was more broken; only a few lines could still be read:
[…Definition of the Key: must possess visibility into Basic Covenant chain structure and be capable of inserting local corrections at the instant of signing.]
[…The physical bearer of the Key must be bound to the execution node of the World Rollback Covenant; their life and death state shall directly affect the conditions under which the contingency can be triggered.]
[…To prevent premature destruction of the Key, a black fog must be cast over certain segments of the bearer's Basic Covenant at birth, so the system cannot read or write them.]
Key.
Bearer.
Black fog at birth.
Line by line, the page was spelling out his last twenty-odd years.
He remembered his first Basic Covenant recitation, the way no one else could see that obscuring cloud. Remembered how, the other night, the fog devoured the words he tried to read on himself. Remembered Lian De's systems trying to verify his "fallen in battle" status and slamming into that same fog, forced to scrape up only the word "fallen."
None of that had been glitches.
They were design.
Qi Luo's knuckles went white.
He held his breath and slid that page back, then couldn't help pulling out a third.
This one was almost whole.
[Key of the World Rollback Covenant] sat neatly in the header.
Below it was a block of text that had been heavily scratched out, then drowned in ink.
The old ink had cracked over time; through the fissures, a few fragments still peeked through:
[…should be reclaimed by the War-God Council before contingency activation…]
[…if recovery fails, temporary usage rights pass to the abyssal proxy party…]
[…any unauthorized unchaining or renaming shall be treated as an act against the world's Basic Covenant…]
The final characters were buried too deep under ink, even chain-sight couldn't penetrate them.
Qi Luo slowly lowered the page.
He could tell these covenant scraps were once notes from some "Basic Covenant Revision Committee"—and for some reason, they'd been tossed down here with the half-stripped machinery, buried under Rust Street.
Thrown away—or hidden.
"If it hadn't been for that night," Qi Luo thought, "I'd probably still be lying in that pit right now, jammed into this machine as the 'key.'"
In that version, he wouldn't be studying in classes, patching contracts in the black market, or rerouting World-Scale backlash under the Ritual Tower. He'd just be a cog waiting for someone to push a button. When the World Rollback Contingency triggered, a chain would wake him, he'd turn once, and the world would reset.
What Garth's squad had done that night, at the core, was this—
They'd ripped the key out of the engine.
"And then dumped it on Rust Street."
Qi Luo swept his gaze around the underground space.
His eyes had grown used to the clutter.
If he treated this place as a discarded, half-disassembled world rollback engine, then this clearing was its former heart.
The heart was missing. The shell remained. The conduits remained. Old safety clauses and redundant mechanisms still clung to the walls.
And scattered everywhere, covenant scraps and runic shards—
It was a junkyard.
A clause junkyard.
"…Clause junkyard," Qi Luo chuckled.
"What are you laughing at?" The Forbidden Sigil sounded annoyed.
"At myself," Qi Luo answered it. "You were built as World-Scale expendable, and now you're growing up on the edge of a dump. Fits, doesn't it?"
He crouched and pinched up a shard of runic metal near the rim.
Tiny thing, tooth-shaped, the characters on it almost gone. Only one remained barely visible: "Liability."
"Responsibility," Qi Luo murmured.
Responsibility. In clause-speak, it was simple—it only asked: who takes the fall.
He rolled the shard between his fingers, and a thought took shape—ridiculous and crystalline at once.
—What could this place be?
A gutted heart of a world rollback engine. Semi-retired runic machinery. Overflow from old Covenant Chains. A hidden crack linking Rust Street and the World Base-Covenant Node.
And one person the world's ledgers already recorded as dead.
"Nameless Firm," he said softly.
He blinked at his own words, then smiled.
Rust Street had plenty of back-alley "firms," but none that could really do surgery under the world's clauses. At most they tweaked some debt contract to spread the "liability," added a line for some minor god—"cannot be dismissed unilaterally"—or played tricks so a fine hit your account a few days late.
This place was different.
Part of the World Rollback Covenant had once hung here.
The leftover runes on these walls, the half-dismantled mechanical cavities in the ground, the old chains still tied into the conduit lines—if he had the patience to map them one by one, he could turn this place into a true clause lab.
Up above, Qi Luo was already "dead."
He couldn't open a legal office at the Academy gates under his real name anymore.
But down here in a forgotten pipe, using a name no roster recorded, he could open a firm that only gods, Fallen Knights, and bottom-dwellers driven insane by clauses would ever look for—
Specializing in everything written wrong, written to death, written in ways they never should've been.
"Nameless Firm," he repeated, liking the sound more and more. "Nameless slips into the seams easiest."
The Forbidden Sigil warmed again, a fuzzy note of agreement.
Qi Luo stood, folded the most important pages with care, and tucked them into the innermost pocket of his bag. Then he cast one last look around.
"This needs cleaning," he listed silently. "Got to seal the really dangerous loose chains first."
He reached out and touched a fragment of old chain still glowing faintly on the circle's edge.
Letters crawled along it:
[Rollback Execution · Test Mode]
A smaller line followed:
[Test status: aborted.]
Qi Luo sighed.
"Then stay aborted," he said, and wrote a simple footnote into the clause:
[Test protocol—permanently sealed.]
The old chain trembled as the words sank in, but didn't resist. It had been abandoned long ago. No one had ever bothered to give it a proper "sealing note."
Now, someone had.
Someone it was originally meant to erase.
"In the future," Qi Luo said quietly, "if anyone asks what this place is, I'll say—old pipes, dead machinery, a few useless chains."
He smiled. "Oh, and a corpse."
He turned to go deeper down the pipe—but a half-collapsed stretch of wall made him stop.
Something about one patch of stone stood out.
It was smoother than the rest.
Instead of the usual mess of cuts, it held a single, very neatly carved clause text—split in two and torn apart, the halves misaligned.
Qi Luo stepped closer.
The words on the stone floated into view in his chain-sight.
On the left:
[…if the Key of the World Rollback Covenant is not recovered within the specified window, then activate…]
On the right:
[…Rewrite Contingency: permit the Key to submit its own new covenant proposal, on condition that—]
The entire middle was empty.
It looked like someone had gouged out that whole section—stone and letters both—leaving the left and right pieces still glued where they'd been.
"Key of the World Rollback Covenant," Qi Luo read.
If the key wasn't recovered on schedule, a "rewrite contingency" would engage.
In other words—if the world couldn't slot him back into his tool-slot on time, there had once been a backup plan written into the contract.
The Key could "submit a new covenant proposal."
The conditions were in the missing middle.
"What conditions?" Qi Luo's throat tightened.
By a certain deadline?
Sacrifice some part of himself?
Accept some irreversible cost?
Any of those would change what he could do from here on.
He raised a hand and pressed his fingers to the scraped-out stone.
The rock was rough; the friction pricked his skin.
In chain-sight, that band was pitch black—no letters, no lingering imprints, as if nothing had ever been carved there.
"Who scraped it?" he asked himself.
The War-God?
The Council?
Or that abyssal shadow that had cut a deal with them?
"Either way—" he withdrew his hand, voice low, "someone doesn't want the Key seeing that part."
But its existence alone already said plenty.
The World Rollback Covenant hadn't been set in stone from the first draft.
In at least one version, it had allowed the Key to propose a "new covenant."
"So everything I've done so far…" Qi Luo thought of his footnotes, the pins he'd inserted into Chains, the way he'd bound responsibility, "does that count as secretly playing out the conditions on that scraped-off clause ahead of time?"
The Forbidden Sigil kept its silence.
It only burned a bit brighter, like someone in an unseen room had turned a lamp up a notch.
Qi Luo stepped back and took a long look at the wall.
The mangled clause was a giant blank, hanging right at his eye-line.
"Key of the World Rollback Covenant," he said again.
The words echoed in the hollow underground space, half-ridiculous, half-solemn—like reading a verdict to himself.
He laughed suddenly, not sure whether at himself or at the sense of humor in whoever wrote the world's contracts.
"Then let's start here," he told the wall, as if addressing an invisible officiant. "From an old pipe. From a pile of clauses you all tossed down here."
"First I'll open a firm."
"And the day you really try to pull that Recovery Contingency—" he lifted a hand and traced a circle in the air, as if drawing some future point. "—we can sit down and talk about the 'Key' and the terms of that 'new covenant proposal.'"
The wall stayed quiet.
Only a stray wind blew in from deeper in the pipe, stirring the loose scraps on the floor. One page flipped over and settled again.
Its back bore a blurred line of text:
[…mortals must not be written dead.]
Qi Luo looked at the words, his smile thinning.
"I hope you get to decide that," he said softly.
Then he turned, stepped over the circle's rim, and walked deeper into the pipe.
This old road toward the world's heart now had a new name—
—The underground base of the Nameless Firm.