The night wind over Rust Street was warmer than it had been on Plague Night.
The sheets hanging on the rooftops no longer dripped; they just swung lazily in the breeze, carrying a mixed smell of herbs and smoke. Stall lamps on the corners were lighting up one by one again. People were still coughing, but now the coughs were half-buried under a few lines of crude jokes and curses.
Qi Luo pulled down the iron shutter of the Scrap & Salvage shop and waved back toward the few people inside.
"No overtime tonight?" Luo Xiu had an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. He shot Qi Luo a wink. "Mister Contract-Smith."
"Contract-smith my ass." Qi Luo couldn't be bothered with him. "The Chains in the city are shaking weird tonight. I'm going up to take a look."
Sangya glanced up. "Heading to the mid-levels again? Careful someone remembers your face."
"If they remember, they remember." Qi Luo shrugged. "My name's already died once on the roster."
He slung his satchel over one shoulder and cut through the back alley toward the old pipeworks.
The Forbidden Sigil at his chest warmed, not that rolling, scalding alarm from before, but like someone rapping a distant table—steady rhythm, a hint of urgent restraint.
"Yeah, yeah, I hear you," Qi Luo answered it in his head. "I think something's off tonight too."
He suddenly veered away, skipping the underground route, and slipped into a shaft that led straight toward the mid-levels.
Between Rust Street and the mid-tier were a few freight passages long since abandoned. Only people who knew the back ways even knew they were there. Qi Luo climbed a narrow iron ladder; in his Chain-sight, the Covenant lay over the whole city like a sheet of paper, with the wind slowly lifting one corner.
The Hunter system's section glowed with cold light.
One line extended from the Covenant Hunters' outpost, feeling its way quietly in Rust Street's direction.
Like a hand that had just finished withdrawing an old order—and was ready to reach out and grab again.
Qi Luo stopped halfway up the ladder.
"...Here we go," he whispered.
When the ambush came, everything was very quiet.
The derelict freight hall near the mid-level edge of Rust Street had its iron doors welded shut. Safety posters peeled halfway off the walls. A few unwanted cargo crates lay scattered on the floor.
When Qi Luo pushed the door open, there was almost no wind through the crack.
He paused on the threshold, wary.
No one should be here. By rights, this place was dead. But the feel of the Chains told him some system had "reserved" this hall in advance for tonight.
He lifted a hand and drew lightly through the air.
Hunter-chains—faint, but definitely there.
"Ruan Ji," he said.
No answer.
The next second, all the lights in the freight hall flared on.
Not normal lamps. A ring of cold white sigils rose from the gaps in the floorboards—the Hunter system's duel array.
"Qi Luo, illegal contract-smith," a familiar voice rang out from above, cool and clear. "In the name of the Hunter system, I initiate a formal duel and adjudication against you."
Qi Luo looked up.
Ruan Ji stood on the top beam of a rack, Hunter cloak hanging down, its color hard to tell in the white glare. One hand braced against the beam, the other at her side, Chains dangling from her sleeve like a snake not yet fully uncoiled.
Behind her, a monitoring stone hung on the wall, glowing faintly—this duel was being recorded.
"Formal duel?" Qi Luo raised a brow. "You do like your ambushes procedural."
"You like procedure," Ruan Ji said. "So I'll humor you."
She dropped from the beam, landing steady across from him, the two of them facing each other across the glowing sigils.
The Hunter array spread fast across the floor, circling them both in a neat ring.
Tiny script ran around the edge:
[Hunter Duel Clause: within the designated array, the Hunter system and the illegal target jointly sign a duel covenant. During execution, both sides may not call external aid; all Chain operations are entered into record.]
A dozen lines wrapped the full circle, ending in a single line at the center:
[Possible outcomes include, but are not limited to: escort, crippling injury, death…]
"Which one are you aiming for?" Qi Luo asked.
"You know." Ruan Ji said.
She raised her hand and cut the air.
The Hunter system responded immediately. A transparent covenant pane appeared between them.
[Hunter Duel Covenant]
[Hunter side: Ruan Ji.]
[Target under review: Qi Luo (roster status: deceased—pending verification).]
[Purpose of duel: verify life/death status; determine whether target constitutes 'Rules Layer abnormal interferer,' and, depending on outcome, escort or terminate.]
[Special note: should a high-tier stripe of uncontrollable nature be detected during the duel, Hunter is authorized to apply higher-level measures.]
"'Higher-level measures.'" Qi Luo let out a short laugh. "Pretty name for it."
Ruan Ji's eyes were very calm.
"Sign," she said.
Hunter duels had an iron rule—both sides had to sign before the system recognized it as a "legal adjudication," and only then could the Hunter invoke certain exclusive clauses.
Qi Luo stared at the floating pane, thoughts racing.
——Name-Erasure.
He knew the Council had that trick.
No one had told him. A few days ago, he'd just seen something on Ruan Ji's Chains that shouldn't have been there—a dark filament, like a black thorn silently driven into one corner of the Hunter system.
He hadn't touched it then, just made a mark in his mind: this is a dangerous clause that needs a 'simulation test.'
Simulation test.
Any high-risk new clause had to be hung with a "test mode" before the world system allowed full execution—run the thing in a safe environment first, so you didn't punch a hole in the world by accident.
The rule was buried in the Base-Covenant's testing section, boring as hell, but Qi Luo had flipped that part. And he remembered it.
High-tier Name-Erasure, Qi Luo thought. You people definitely hardwired it to a test module.
Where would that module sit?
——In the Hunter system.
——On the executor themselves.
He lifted his hand and touched the covenant pane.
As soon as his fingertip made contact, a fine Chain slid out from the lower edge of the pane, reaching to bind the name "Qi Luo" to the duel clauses.
Qi Luo followed it in and slipped a little something inside.
A sliver of writing.
So small the Hunter system naturally filed it as "log annotation" and didn't bother to highlight it.
[Experimental-mode supplemental note: any attempt during this duel to perform high-risk alterations to the opponent's roster status (including but not limited to Name-Erasure or roster rewrite) must first complete a full mirror test-run on the executor's own name, to verify clause safety.]
He hadn't written "forbidden," hadn't written "ban." Just "must test first."
From the system's vantage, it was nothing more than a shadow-run. From Qi Luo's vantage—it meant you first. Try your brand-new toy on yourself before you use it on someone else.
The Hunter system's test module glanced over the line.
It looked compliant, even quoting the original phrasing from the testing section—clean, "improves safety," the kind of good-faith annotation bureaucrats loved.
So that almost invisible line slid quietly into the duel covenant structure, lost among hundreds of other fine-print rules.
Ruan Ji watched him.
"Signed?" she asked.
"Signed," Qi Luo released his hand.
On the pane, beside "Target under review: Qi Luo," a tiny signature rune lit up.
On the Hunter's side, the system had already autographed "Ruan Ji" when the array was formed.
The covenant was sealed.
The ring's edge chimed softly.
[Hunter duel protocol: initiated.]
Ruan Ji raised her hand.
The black Chain slid from her sleeve, shining like wet ink, crawling across the floor before lifting itself toward the covenant pane.
That was not the color of a normal Hunter shackle.
The first time Qi Luo had seen it, he'd known—this was the Name-Erasure order.
"You're smart," Ruan Ji said in that neither-warm-nor-cold tone. "So you understand that killing just your body is pointless."
"You'd find a way to crawl back out of other people's memories and the gaps between clauses."
"So—" she tightened her grip on the black Chain, "I have to send your name away with you."
The Chain, as if scenting blood, began to tighten toward Qi Luo's name.
In the Chain-world, the node "Qi Luo" flared under its focus.
From the little chapel prayers on Rust Street, to the Human Clause Appendix on the Temple Square, to the words "Nameless Firm" scratched on the old pipe wall—every Covenant page tied to him was brushed over by that black thread.
[Target locked: all records bearing the name 'Qi Luo.']
[Execution content: sever bindings between the name and all clauses; erase from Basic Covenant and mortal roster.]
Qi Luo lifted his head, watching the line draw closer.
His heart was beating a bit faster, but he didn't step back.
Come on, he thought. Let's see what your shiny new toy can do.
The black Chain snapped and lunged at his name.
In that exact instant—
The duel covenant's structure shuddered.
That almost invisible line of text flickered to life.
[Detected: high-risk roster alteration attempt.]
[Per experimental-mode supplemental note, this clause must first complete a mirror test-run on the executor's own name.]
The execution logic stumbled.
Inside the Hunter system, the test module—like an old steward rudely awakened—put on its glasses and leafed through the covenant:
——Duel covenant in force.
——Both signatures complete.
——Supplemental note quotes the test section verbatim. Valid.
"By the book," the old steward said lazily. "You first."
Someone yanked the black Chain from behind.
Its tip, which had been aimed dead at "Qi Luo," twisted midair, knotted itself, and spun back—driving straight at the three characters of "Ruan Ji."
Her pupils shrank.
She reacted fast. Her hand snapped up, trying to clamp the Chain down by brute force.
But the Name-Erasure order was no ordinary shackle.
The Council had dragged it out of the forbidden archives and rewrapped it once more with the World Rollback Covenant's test rules. Once activated, it had to walk its entire process, or it didn't count as an "attempt."
[Mirror test-run starting: subject—executor, Ruan Ji.]
On the Base-Covenant's side, the World grumbled and ticked a small box under the Hunter system.
Qi Luo saw it all clearly in the Chains.
The black thread veered completely away from him, following Ruan Ji's Hunter registration code, first touching her Hunter name, then feeling toward the mortal roster entry the chapel had written for her as a child.
[Test-run content: temporarily disconnect executor from roster bindings; simulate Name-Erasure effect.]
[Note: to ensure system safety, test-run does not include physical annihilation, only adjusts visibility and Covenant bindings.]
In other words—she wasn't going to turn to ash on the spot. But she was about to "vanish" from every clause.
"—Stop," Ruan Ji hissed.
The black Chain did not stop.
It listened to clauses, not people.
She had just enough time to look up; his eyes—too clear, as always—met hers.
Qi Luo watched her and said quietly:
"I'm sorry."
The next heartbeat, the world split down the middle.
No sound. No light. Not like the abyss, not like normal darkness. More like someone had cut a slit in the Covenant page with a knife.
Ruan Ji's awareness was yanked backward.
She didn't have time to grab anything. She just felt every Chain, every ID, every label on her body being snipped one by one—not truly broken, but moved to some other grid.
In the Hunter system, her entry turned into a blank.
[Hunter Ruan Ji: record not found.]
Her task log, battle performance clauses, immunity statements—within a breath, they all turned gray and got auto-filed under "unknown error."
Worse still—on the mortal roster, the ink of her name drained at speed.
As if someone had dumped water over the page.
She was still standing in the freight hall, but she could feel with painful clarity that the monitoring stones no longer saw her, the Hunter shackles could no longer touch her, even the Temple's "merits and punishments" register now treated her like empty air.
The world's attitude toward her had gone from "a mortal marked as Hunter" to "there was never anyone here," in a single instant.
"—Ruan Ji!" Somewhere in reality, it sounded like someone was calling her name.
As if from behind several panes of glass.
She tried to turn, but her body felt glued to a transparent film, unable to move, unable to speak.
The freight hall warped at the edges as some kind of offset twisted the view.
Across from her, Qi Luo was still standing in the same spot.
The Hunter sigils still glowed faintly underfoot.
Only, in the array's structure, the line "Hunter side: Ruan Ji" had flipped from "present" to "null."
[Duel covenant status: Hunter side name currently not visible; executor deemed to have exited duel.]
The system issued its conclusion with crisp efficiency.
Ruan Ji watched, mind blank for a moment.
Then she understood.
She was falling into a space where "no one could see."
That space between "recorded" and "never written."
Not everyone knew it existed.
Only people who had clawed along the edges of the clause structure sometimes brushed it in their dreams. Mortals called it the Faded Name Realm. The theological papers called it the name-register interlayer.
In short—someone whose name had been half-erased got stuck here.
"You're insane," she told the Covenant Council in her head with a cold laugh. "Using something like this on a Rust Street kid."
"Now look," she thought. "You erased me first."
The black Chain circled her chest once and went still.
Test-run: successful.
The Hunter system jotted down its result:
[Name-Erasure test-run result: executor's own name can be temporarily moved off the registers, creating an interlayer state; basic structure still intact; long-term outcomes unknown.]
[Suggestion: when applying full Name-Erasure to target, attach additional protection clauses to avoid spillover onto executor.]
By the time that "suggestion" was written, the executor was already in the interlayer.
For some reason, Ruan Ji wanted to laugh.
She couldn't. All she could do was stare from the crack at the crooked lines of text.
Back in the real freight hall—
From an outside viewpoint, the duel sigils had barely lit, the Hunter Chain had just extended, and in the next blink… Ruan Ji was gone.
No explosion. No scream. No blood.
One person at the edge of the array had simply been wiped away like a smudge of graphite.
The monitoring stone emitted a shrill, indescribable squeal.
[Error: Hunter side data missing.]
[Error: duel covenant other party not found.]
[Error: cannot locate Ruan Ji personal Chains.]
Priests watching from Rust Street and mid-level monitoring nodes all froze.
"...Where'd she go?" someone whispered.
Qi Luo stood in the center of the circle, scalp prickling.
This had been part of his calculation, but watching a living person get half-erased from the world's "paper" still turned his stomach.
Without a detectable "Hunter side," the duel array quickly released itself.
The ring of light shrank and faded, leaving only a dull gray mark on the floor.
Qi Luo didn't walk away right away.
He lifted a hand and tapped the air.
"...Ruan Ji?" he tested.
By rights, with her name blocked in the interlayer, any direct invocation should've been eaten by the system.
But Qi Luo wasn't calling the roster. He was knocking on the edge of the key-mark.
The Forbidden Sigil at his chest warmed sharply.
A thread too fine to see reached outward from the black mist around his own name, groping toward a strange patch of emptiness.
That space was like a blob of correction fluid on the world's Covenant page—blindingly white and entirely blank.
Qi Luo's thread pushed into it, bounced off lightly once, then seemed to brush against something soft.
A breath, so faint as to be almost unreal, reached him.
"...Qi Luo?"
Her voice was thin, with an echo like it wasn't quite in the same world.
Qi Luo let out a breath and nearly lost his knees.
"Good," he thought. "You're not completely eaten."
"Where is this?" Ruan Ji's voice floated through the interlayer.
She felt a strange weightlessness.
Her feet still seemed to be on the freight hall floor. The air still carried the smell of rust and moldy cardboard. But at the edges of her vision, everything blurred into text—clauses, notes, ID numbers, like paper scraps blown into a whirlwind, fluttering around her in utter silence.
"The name-register interlayer," Qi Luo said. "Half-erased state."
"Congratulations," he couldn't help needling, "before you tested it on me, you gave yourself a trial run."
Ruan Ji was quiet for a moment.
"You planned this?" she asked.
"More or less," Qi Luo said. "I wasn't sure you'd go straight for Name-Erasure, so I bound all 'high-risk roster alterations' in the duel covenant to test mode in one sweep."
"Didn't expect you to swing it down that decisively."
"So now I've been 'tested' in?" Ruan Ji's tone was level.
"Let's say," Qi Luo corrected, "you let the Council's secret order test itself. I just made it follow the World's own rules."
He paused, then softened his voice.
"When did you get the Name-Erasure order?"
"After the plague," Ruan Ji answered.
She briefly described how the black Chain had crawled into her Hunter system.
Qi Luo listened, his frown deepening.
"So they're already this scared," he murmured. "The words 'contract-smith' barely show up in the Rules Layer and they're rushing to shave the name off."
Ruan Ji didn't respond to that.
In the interlayer, she could see very clearly the Chains around Qi Luo—his name, his Firm, that whole mess of annotations.
It was her first time seeing all that from outside the record.
As a Hunter, she was always on the "enforcement end" of the Chains—seeing the system's conclusions and targets.
Now she stood in a place even the system couldn't be bothered to monitor and watched the little scribbles mortals wrote in the margins.
A lot of them were naive. A lot were crude.
And some, she had to admit—were written with more sense than certain chief gods.
"You just took me off the Hunter rolls," she said suddenly.
"Temporarily," Qi Luo stressed. "Once the test-run finishes, the system theoretically has to offer you a 'write-back' window—you get to choose where your name hangs."
"Choose?" Ruan Ji snorted. "What choices? Go back to being their knife? Or vanish for good?"
"There's a third," Qi Luo said.
"What third?"
"Come over here," Qi Luo said quietly. "Come to 'the side that's already died once.'"
Ruan Ji blinked.
"You trying to recruit me into the Fallen Hunters?" she said dryly.
"Call it whatever you like," Qi Luo replied. "You can still be a Hunter. You can be a consultant. You can be—"
He paused, picking his word carefully.
"You can be my 'witness.'"
"Witness what?" she asked.
"Every word I write into the clauses," Qi Luo said. "So that when the Council or some chief god one day screams 'tampering,' you can say you saw exactly how I wrote it."
"You think they'll care what someone who crawled out of a name-gap says?" Ruan Ji shot back.
"Maybe not at first," Qi Luo said. "But the Rules Layer will."
"Anything written in the interlayer—if the key punches a hole, it can seep back."
He raised his hand and wrote a tiny line in the freight hall's air—not for the world, but for the interlayer.
[Temporary clause: Hunter Ruan Ji, currently dwelling in the name-register interlayer, may, via Qi Luo's key-mark, obtain one 'observation line' and thereby observe his subsequent clause operations, free from Hunter system directives.]
The Forbidden Sigil at his chest stabbed with pain.
The World Base-Covenant clearly did not appreciate this "key authorization."
[Warning: key-mark expansion of observation range is inadvisable.]
Qi Luo bit down harder and didn't retract it.
"What are you doing?" Ruan Ji felt the weightlessness under her feet steady a touch.
It felt like she'd been caught by a single line, stopping her from drifting too far.
"Giving you a rope," Qi Luo said. "So I don't lose you in there."
"You're not afraid—" her tone went cold, "that I'll follow the rope, watch every illegal edit you make, and pick your proudest moment to cut you down?"
Qi Luo smiled.
"I am," he said. "But more than I'm afraid of that, I'm afraid you'll stay where the Council pulls your strings and swing blind at whatever they point to."
The lamps in the freight hall had dimmed; only a single emergency light glowed yellow in the corner.
From outside, it still just looked like Qi Luo standing there talking to the air, like a crazy man.
Which, from some angles, he was.
"You've got a choice," he said at last. "Either wait for the test to end, let the system 'correct the error' and write you back into the Hunter rolls as just another ID on a Chain."
"Or treat this as—"
He searched for the word.
"Your own 'fake death.'"
In the interlayer, Ruan Ji was silent for a long time.
She could feel it—the Hunter system was indeed trying to "fix the error."
Chains quivered at a distance, reaching to grab her name and drag it back to the old grid.
It felt like someone trying to redraw the same line of characters on a sheet they had just scrubbed clean.
On Qi Luo's side, there was only one thin thread.
So thin it looked like a tug would snap it.
"...Do you know what happens if a Name-Erasure goes all the way?" she asked suddenly.
"I know some of it," Qi Luo said.
"Then you know what I just tried to do to you?"
He was quiet for a moment, then answered honestly:
"I do."
A wind that didn't exist stirred the interlayer.
Ruan Ji laughed.
Softly. A little like that self-mocking breath she'd let out on the wind-tower when she watched him wrestle the plague alone.
"You knew and still stepped into the array," she said.
"You knew there'd be test mode and still dragged it out," Qi Luo shot back. "We're even."
"So right now—" she said slowly, "you're digging me out of the Hunter roster with one hand and tossing me a rope with the other?"
"Call it a kidnapping if you want," Qi Luo said. "I'm stealing you from their side. You owe me."
"This is what you call 'redemption'?" she asked, irony sharp.
"For you and me both," Qi Luo said. "You don't have to carry that Name-Erasure order anymore. And I don't have to keep waiting for you to swing it."
"From the clauses' point of view, that's fair."
Silence fell again in the interlayer.
Far off, those Chains trying to "fix the error" still swayed uncertainly.
They hesitated, unsure whether to drag this name back from the crack. Forcing might scrape against the boundary scar left by the rollback key-mark. The risk was higher.
"...How long do I have?" Ruan Ji asked quietly.
"Right now? The test-run doesn't list an 'auto rollback time,'" Qi Luo said. "They were so sure you'd obediently carry out the real cut, they didn't think you'd test-fly yourself first."
"So you've got time," he said, smiling. "Plenty of time to think."
"Think about what?"
"Whether you go back to that Hunter Chain," Qi Luo said, "or—"
He paused.
"Pick another path."
Outside the freight hall, the night wind picked up.
Someone passed in the distance, hearing faint footsteps inside but seeing no light. They wrote it off as rats.
Qi Luo slung his satchel back into place, stepped over the faint ring the array had left, and glanced once at where they had been standing.
There was nothing.
Only a few faint scuffs in the dust, where the Chains had brushed the floor.
"I'm heading back," he told the interlayer. "Back to Rust Street."
"The next few days, you're going to feel awful," he warned. "The world won't answer you. The Hunter system won't assign you anything. Whatever god-name you call, it'll be like talking to a wall."
"But you'll see me."
"If you want, come watch how a Firm carved out of the seams of the world does business."
Ruan Ji didn't reply.
She stood in that blank cut-out space, the patch the world had peeled off its own page, and shut her eyes, slowly evening her breath.
——No clauses were monitoring that breath.
——No performance logs counted how many tasks she finished today.
——No orders murmured at her ear: "You still owe us one stroke."
There was only one thin line, tugging at her just a little.
Toward Rust Street.
At her chest, where the Hunter badge usually lay hot, there was only cool skin for the first time.
"Qi Luo," she whispered into the dark, barely loud enough to stir anything.
This time, no system categorized the name, no record filed the call under "prayer Chains" or "mission notes."
Only the edge of the interlayer rippled.
Like something that didn't belong here had reached out a hand.
"Welcome," a voice said with a crooked smile. "To the Nameless Firm."
"Hunter-lady—you're off the roster now too."
Ruan Ji opened her eyes.
The freight hall was still there, outlines washed-out like old paper.
She lifted a hand and traced a single character in the air.
The mark wasn't taken by the World Base-Covenant. It just left the faintest trace on the walls of the interlayer:
"See".
She had seen.
And been seen.
The ambush had failed. Name-Erasure hadn't landed.
But from the world's perspective, the record of Hunter Ruan Ji had indeed "vanished" for a time.
And in a place only the key-mark and the interlayer could sense, a new covenant had taken shape in silence.
It was about how two people, neither with a whole name left, would stand at the edge of the world's paper and try, bit by bit, to rewrite something.