After Plague Night, order returned to Skycast City—at least on the surface.
The temple bells still rang on schedule, over and over. Smoke still rose from the iron towers above the workshops. The little churches still lined their lower-rung believers up at morning prayer to drink "purification water," movements smooth and practised, as if nothing had happened at all.
Curses, hawking, haggling layered over the streets again. The memory of that night when the city almost burned was shoved, by sheer force, back down into everyone's chest.
Only the Chains knew—the ripples from that night hadn't stopped.
In the chain-room of the Covenant Hunters' outpost, the light was as cold as ever.
Panels of covenants floated in midair like snowflakes that would never land, turning over in the air with icy stillness.
At a certain moment, a little square tagged "Error Data" flickered once.
[System repair: attempting to remount missing Hunter record—Ruan Ji.]
The spot that had previously shown "record does not exist" was quietly pried open deep in the World Base-Covenant.
A thin line reached out from there, groping cautiously along the edge of the name-register interlayer—like an administrator both annoyed and curious about an error, sticking a hand into the recycle bin to see if there was anything that could still be pulled back.
The tip of that line brushed against a person.
"You sure about this?" Qi Luo asked from the other end.
His voice slipped along the key-mark's fine line into the interlayer, calm as always. "Once you agree to go back, it's more than just getting 'picked out of the trash.' They'll patch your file, write new annotations."
"Annotations are still better than blank," Ruan Ji said lightly.
Wind in the interlayer blew past her, taking away the last bits of hesitation.
She reached out and caught the system's repair line.
"What about conditions?" she asked.
"My clauses are already wedged in," Qi Luo said. "No matter what new labels they slap on your file, that hidden 'human-first' priority won't be pulled out so easily."
"And besides—" he paused, "you won't be going back alone."
Ruan Ji frowned. "Who else?"
"The ones you can't see," Qi Luo said. "Lihen. The Fallen Knights. Those minor gods we've edited. And—this firm."
"We've all written on the 'outside' of your new file."
"The invisible lines are always the most," Ruan Ji said.
She huffed a soft laugh and tightened her grip on the repair line.
On the World Base-Covenant's side, the system seemed to let out a small sigh of relief—after all, correcting an error was easier than admitting it had punched a hole in itself.
[Hunter Ruan Ji: record restored.]
[Error explanation: during Plague Night duel, chain-shock led to temporary disconnect of personal roster record; now repaired.]
Inside the Hunter system interface, her square lit up again.
Battle records, task lists, permission clauses all reattached themselves, one after another—only on the deepest layer, a new structure sat in the place where Qi Luo had just embedded it.
[Hunter · Duty Revision (hidden): prioritize mortals' baseline.]
[Hunter · Right of Refusal (hidden): may question and refuse orders that clearly violate the Base-Covenant's bottom line.]
[Hidden Priority: when gods and mortals conflict, default to treating human rights as the better option for world stability.]
On the system panel, those words weren't conspicuous. They were filed as "supplemental recommendations," stuffed into a corner no one cared to check.
Ruan Ji opened her eyes.
Under the cold light, the chain-room at the Hunters' outpost was exactly as she remembered—
So familiar she knew every crack in every stone, so familiar she even knew that one stubborn droplet in the corner that never seemed to fall, and how annoying it was in the middle of the night.
"You're back?" The command-stone at the door lit up.
Ruan Ji stood where she was and let out a slow breath.
"System says I only disconnected for a bit," she said evenly. "Back online now."
No one knew where she'd just come back from.
The world's roster would only ever write one line: "Brief error, now repaired."
The command-stone flashed, spitting out a new directive.
[Task update: continue tracking illegal covenant-rewriter Qi Luo, collect data on his methods of clause interference, and execute termination if necessary.]
A small line sat at the end:
[Internal Directive · S-17: execution temporarily suspended.]
Ruan Ji looked at those characters, a hint of cold mockery sliding through her gaze.
—Suspended did not mean cancelled.
—The Name-Erasure order had simply been put on "hold."
"Got it," she replied, voice flat.
To the system, it was just a clean, efficient response from a Hunter.
To the fine line running from Qi Luo, it was the first coded signal from someone who'd defected.
Beneath Rust Street, at the Nameless Firm—
"She's gone back?" Garth asked.
Qi Luo pulled himself out of the Chain-world and rubbed his forehead.
"More or less," he said. "On their files, it's 'brief disconnect then recovery.' From our angle—"
"She went back undercover with a brand-new covenant," Luo Xiu finished for him. "Sounds badass."
Sangya kept quiet, but her fingers tapped the tabletop.
"You sure she won't pull that Name-Erasure order out again and swing it at you if she has to?" she asked.
"That order's now tied to a chunk of her own test-run record," Qi Luo said. "If she fires it again, she has to put herself through that once more first."
He paused, then added, "Of course, I can't rule out she's ruthless enough."
"So you still need to watch your back," Garth concluded.
"I'm watching the world, not her," Qi Luo said softly.
He looked up at the Firm's stone wall.
A big sheet of old iron had been bolted there, covered in a dense forest of scrap pinned to it—rune-etched metal chipped out of old abyss pipes, snippets of clauses copied from minor gods' memories, and broken covenant stones he'd bought off the black market.
"You pick up a new hoarding hobby?" Luo Xiu whistled. "From a distance it kinda looks like a serial killer's crime map."
"This is the world's crime scene," Qi Luo corrected. "We're just helping it reconstruct how the crime went down."
On the surface, those fragments looked like junk.
But if you had Qi Luo's eyes, the ones that could see the flows of Covenant Chains, you'd find a strange logic tying them together—like a torn blueprint whose lines still matched up when you pushed the pieces close enough.
"Where'd all this come from?" Sangya asked.
"A batch from Lihen," Qi Luo said. "It once scribbled a few lines in the chief Plague-God's restricted archives."
He pointed at a half-transparent shard.
Crooked text crawled across it:
[Rollback…]
[key-name…]
[test-run…]
"And this chunk's from the night the Fallen Knights defected," he pointed to a different piece of pipe wall. "They hacked off a section of conduit carved with forbidden covenants on their way out."
The runes on that pipe wall had been scorched almost beyond recognition. Only a few remained readable:
[abyssal mist-sea—]
[initial Skycast City state—]
[reset threshold—]
"What about these latest bits? Who sent those?" Garth asked.
Qi Luo didn't answer right away. He pulled out a very small shard sealed in black wax.
There was no temple seal on the wax—just a symbol he'd only recently learned to recognize.
The Hunter system's internal marker for a "mis-deletion log."
"Her," Qi Luo said, lifting the shard to the lamp.
The black wax softened in the heat, revealing a sliver of covenant underneath.
Not many words, like an excerpt from a world-level contingency:
[World Rollback Covenant · parameter segment]
[If world structure deviates severely from original trajectory and the divine authority system loses its self-check capacity, rollback via the 'key' of the carrier may be enacted to…]
The line cut off there.
But a few keywords remained:
[Phase One: city-level reset.]
[Phase Two: continent-level.]
[Phase Three: ——]
The third line had been violently scraped clean, leaving only an "empty" symbol.
Garth swore under his breath.
"So this thing really was written long ago," Luo Xiu muttered. "And you're the 'key.'"
"Don't rush to conclusions," Qi Luo said, pressing the fragment onto a particular spot on the iron sheet and giving it a light push.
Runic lines along the shard's edge clicked into place against neighboring scraps.
Faint light crawled along the seams of the metal, tracing out a fuller pattern—
In the center was a complex spiral, ringed by three circular layers of clauses.
The innermost ring read:
[City-level: local incineration and rollback; objective: 'adjust population and divine power distribution.']
The second ring read:
[Continent-level: rewrite regional base-clauses, erasing certain civilizations if needed.]
The third ring should have had text, but had been ground down to a black band.
Only a blurry outline remained, like three symbols whose bones had been scraped off.
"The third ring…" Sangya squinted. "Nothing you can make out?"
"I can see a little," Qi Luo said.
In his Chain-sight, a faint symbol hovered at the edge of that black fog.
It was a pattern he knew too well.
—The structure of the Forbidden Sigil on his chest.
Like a flattened spiral.
Or a key wedged into a lock.
He pressed his hand to his chest on reflex.
The sigil flared hot at once, resonating almost instinctively with the pattern on the wall.
"Oi," Luo Xiu caught the motion. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," Qi Luo pulled his hand back, faking it as a casual scratch.
In the Chain-world, the runic ring on the wall and the mark on his chest overlapped in some higher dimension—
For a heartbeat, it felt like he wasn't standing in the Firm at all, but at the center of that titanic covenant, his name written in as a "key."
[Carrier]
[Deletable administrator]
[If necessary, this name may be deleted at any time—]
A dull ache thumped through his chest.
Not in flesh, but in the Basic Covenant under that veil of black fog, which had just been forced to show a sliver of its edge.
"Qi Luo?" Garth frowned. "You look off."
"...The world just stared a little too hard," Qi Luo forced a smile. "It's fine. It's not free enough to fixate on me yet."
Even as he said it, his gaze didn't leave the iron panel.
The shards on it were slowly sketching a larger shape.
The section of pipe wall the Fallen Knights had taken matched the "abyssal mist-sea opening."
The line from Lihen's restricted notes pointed to "plague as a test-run tool before rollback."
The parameter scrap from Ruan Ji lined up with "key-trigger conditions for the carrier."
With each new piece, the picture sharpened.
"Look here," Qi Luo pointed at the central spiral. "There are three annotations."
He copied them onto paper:
[Layer One: key-name record—Qi ×× (partially obscured by black fog).]
[Layer Two: permission—may trigger rollback process when world structure overloads.]
[Layer Three: self-delete clause—if necessary, this name may be deleted to terminate rollback authority.]
"Self-delete," Luo Xiu scratched his head. "That's… that 'temporary admin' thing you mentioned?"
Qi Luo nodded.
"Looks like," he said quietly, "they never planned to let me live long."
"Use the key to open the door, then snap it in half," Garth said.
Normally, Qi Luo would've laughed and thrown out a "then snap it" joke. This time he didn't.
He stared at the "self-delete" symbols for a long while.
The World Base-Covenant had clearly been sliced here—strokes and ink density didn't match, and the logic had a jagged break, like someone had shoved a safety latch into the original script.
"Ruan Ji mentioned," Qi Luo recalled, "a high-tier god once tried to probe this stripe. That whole section of Chains went blackscreen, and that god vanished out of the council logs after."
"After that, someone scribbled beside the restricted file: 'Without World Base-Covenant's explicit approval, no chief god may directly touch this stripe.'"
"What about the world itself?" Luo Xiu asked.
"It can touch itself," Qi Luo gave a crooked smile. "Problem is—this thing's hanging on me now."
He lifted the final scrap Ruan Ji had sent and pressed it into the remaining gap.
The pattern on the iron sheet finally closed into a complete half-ring—
The other half was still lost in black fog, but the visible section was enough.
[World Rollback Covenant · partial structure]
[Preconditions: divine authority system has lost self-check capacity; mortals' rights on the clause level have been pressed down to near-zero.]
[Execution flow (abridged): use the carrier's name as key to attempt city-level, continent-level, and world-level rollback in sequence.]
[Termination method: key-name is deleted, or the World Base-Covenant proves "a better solution" exists.]
The last line was especially stark.
"'A better solution,' huh?" Sangya bit down on the phrase.
"For example—" Qi Luo looked up, "the world acknowledges mortals have basic rights. That makes this 'roll everything back to a version where they don't' contingency look outdated, and then it has grounds to shelve it."
"You're saying," Luo Xiu blinked, "you're not here to blow up the world—you're here to… force it to change the exam question?"
"That's the ideal version," Qi Luo said.
"And the least ideal?" Garth asked.
Qi Luo smiled, the curve of his mouth faint.
"Worst-case," he said softly, "they press the 'rollback' key before I grow strong enough to finish writing the new covenant."
"So I never even get to show up as the one who proposed it."
The room went quiet.
The oil lamp cast a flickering orange over the runes on the iron sheet, like light over an old scar rubbed raw.
"So that's our job," Garth said at last. "Help the world find that 'better solution' fast enough that it can say—'the rollback contingency is obsolete, scrap it'—and have the logic to back it up."
"You think it's that reasonable?" Luo Xiu muttered.
"At least it'll argue for itself," Qi Luo said. "It doesn't want to be a dumb system whose only trick is the reset button."
"So we write it new options."
He sank back into his chair and let out a long breath.
"What about Ruan Ji?" Sangya asked. "She tossed you a chunk that big. She's gotta know what you're seeing on your side."
"She knows part of it," Qi Luo said. "She only saw a few lines in the restricted files. Now at least she knows—those lines and my chest are one set."
"She'll move, too." His gaze turned thoughtful. "With a 'human-first' line in the Hunter system, a lot of adjudication logic will start to skew."
"Not by much at first. But it'll skew."
"So you two count as a traitors' alliance now?" Luo Xiu asked.
"We just stepped back from the text far enough to look at it," Qi Luo said. "The ones who can't step back are the ones getting written to death."
He glanced up at the wall of fragments and chuckled.
"And it's not just the two of us defecting," he added. "Lihen defected from the chief Plague-God, the Fallen Knights from the temple. Even that Catastrophe proxy we forced to sign that covenant—he walked out on a piece of the old script too, in his own way."
"That line you made him sign?" Garth caught on. "It's basically him admitting—gods have obligations."
"That's enough," Qi Luo said. "The world will remember: once, the Catastrophe Seat signed a 'shelter covenant' beside a burn-the-city contingency."
"Next time it wants to torch a city, that line will tug on the corner."
Under the oil light, the wall of the Nameless Firm was crowded with covenant scraps.
They came from different eras, different gods, different defectors—
But in Qi Luo's hands, they were slowly forming the same picture.
A giant trap named "rollback."
And a master covenant that still had a chance of being rewritten.
That night was deep, but some tower lights in upper Skycast City stayed on.
At the Hunters' outpost, Ruan Ji stood before a monitoring stone, gaze threading through layers of Chains toward the iron sheet far below in the old pipes.
She couldn't decipher the full text—the name-register interlayer only gave her one observation line; it didn't let her peek at everything she wanted.
But she could see the structure.
That central spiral was identical to the pattern on Qi Luo's chest.
She pressed her palm to her own chest on reflex.
The Hunter badge there was as cold as ever.
"The key," she murmured.
She thought of the little private notes certain High Seats had pushed into the Hunter system earlier that day:
[Key-mark bearer's rate of clause interference increasing.]
[Suggestion: tighten monitoring; prepare for renewed adjudication.]
"They've already smelled the danger," she thought.
So had she.
"It's not just him that's dangerous," she said softly to the monitoring stone. "You are too."
She lifted her hand and wrote a line into her private log-covenant:
[Qi Luo—carrier of the World Rollback Covenant.]
[Current objective: assist him in gathering covenant fragments, speeding up the world's discovery of a 'better solution'; meanwhile—prevent the Council from pressing the key ahead of time.]
This log would never upload to any public Chain. It would stay tucked inside her rewritten Hunter god-covenant, under the entry for "witness."
She closed the covenant and pulled on her Hunter cloak.
"The traitors' alliance…" she repeated Qi Luo's half-joking phrase in her head.
"Hunters, Fallen Knights, minor gods, a Rust Street covenant-smith, and that Catastrophe proxy who probably still doesn't know how far he's been pushed."
She couldn't help a short laugh.
"You don't know this, do you," she thought. "You've all already been written under the same line."
In the Nameless Firm, the oil lamp was almost out, but Qi Luo was still awake.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes half-closed, watching the circles of runes on the wall.
The Forbidden Sigil on his chest pulsed with his breathing, resonating faintly with that section of the World Rollback Covenant on the iron sheet.
"Key of the World Rollback Covenant."
"Deletable administrator."
"If necessary, this name may be deleted at any time."
He reached for his personal draft sheet on the table and added another tiny line:
[If the world is willing to acknowledge basic human rights, this key may be switched to 'do not open for now.']
The letters were small, squeezed into a corner.
The World Base-Covenant wouldn't recognize it right away.
But the key-mark twitched, as if committing the sentence to memory first.
"You have a choice," Qi Luo told himself in his head, and also that massive covenant looming over everything. "You don't have to press it."
"You can learn to be a world that doesn't reset so easily."
The lamp finally went out.
In the darkness, the iron sheet on the wall still glimmered faintly.
The stitched-together clauses formed a giant mesh that covered the whole room.
And at the center of that net, a single name glowed quietly.
—Qi Luo.
—On the roster: deceased.
—In the Rules Layer, already being quietly noted as:
[Covenant-smith.]
[One of the traitors.]