The wind in the old pipes was colder than up on the clocktower.
When Qi Luo climbed down the shaft, his palm skimmed the rusted iron plates, leaving a faint white scratch behind.
The Forbidden Sigil on his chest was still smoldering, like it had just been hauled out of a fire, a veil of invisible ash clinging to it.
"You don't look so good," Luo Xiu said, catching him at the bottom with narrowed eyes. "The clocktower string you up for a spin?"
"It's the world that's on the rope," Qi Luo flexed his stiff fingers. "I just took a look at the noose."
Garth dropped down after him, landing hard. His gaze darkened. "Find anything?"
Qi Luo didn't answer.
He only lifted his head, looking toward the iron sheet deeper in the old pipeline—
The fragments of the World Rollback Covenant had already formed half a diagram. The spiral at the center was like a beast curled tight, lying in silence.
"I need to see him first," Qi Luo said.
"Him?" Sanya glanced up from the circle. "Old Cen?"
The leader of the Fallen Knights, Cen Duo—everyone on Rust Street called him Old Cen.
"Yeah." Qi Luo nodded.
Luo Xiu whistled. "If you're gonna start a fight, give me a heads-up. I'll go buy snacks."
"Shut it." Garth kicked the leg of his chair. "He's digging up a real old tab this time."
Qi Luo said no more. He grabbed an old coat off the wall, shrugged it on, and pushed through the door into the darkness of another pipe.
At the farthest end of Rust Street, there was a tavern whose windows were never open.
The sign above the door had long since fallen off. Only a blurred plank still hung there, the grain faintly showing a few illegible characters.
A string of rusted chains on the lintel clattered wildly in the wind.
Qi Luo pushed the door in. A wave of heat rushed out, thick with alcohol, herbs, and machine oil.
A few broken tables. A few swaying lamps. A few people in battered armor scattered around the room.
Their armor had been scuffed so badly the original crests were gone. Only the crude symbols they'd painted on later remained—
A severed divine chain.
The mark of the Fallen Knights.
"Yo, Little Luo." Someone lifted a hand. "Come have a drink. City didn't get torched by the plague tonight—we ought to toast your little stunt."
Qi Luo nodded to him, but his gaze slid past to the heavy silhouette in the corner.
Cen Duo sat at the very back, his broad shoulders stacked with plates of iron like a compressed mountain.
The cup in his hand didn't hold liquor, but a dark, steaming tea. A thin ribbon of white curled up from it.
"Old Cen," Qi Luo said, walking over.
Cen Duo didn't turn his head. He only raised his cup. "Get him one too."
"I'm not drinking," Qi Luo said.
That one line made the nearby Fallen Knights jolt—
Qi Luo had grown up in this place, and it was the first time he'd refused something Old Cen offered, to his face.
The air stalled for a beat.
Cen Duo slowly set his cup down. His fingers tapped once against the side.
"That brat Luo Xiu piss you off again?" he asked.
"This isn't about him," Qi Luo said. "It's between you and me."
Only then did Cen Duo turn.
His face was seamed with old scars and hard lines carved by the years, but his eyes were bright—two chips of quartz buried in scrap iron.
"You sound like an inquisitor today," he said, eyeing Qi Luo. "They teach you that tone up at the Academy?"
"Today it's not the Academy talking." Qi Luo lifted his hand and tapped the air lightly.
A fine ring of Covenant Chains fanned out from his fingertip, an invisible net dropping over the whole tavern and everyone's names inside it.
The Fallen Knights tensed on instinct—
They weren't afraid of blades or bullets, but anything with the taste of clauses in it put their backs up.
Cen Duo glanced at the ring of Chains, one brow lifting.
"This is… you setting me up?" he snorted.
"I'm not setting you up," Qi Luo said evenly. "I'm making sure the clauses for this conversation are written clearly."
He met Cen Duo's gaze. "That night—what exactly did you carry out of the temple?"
"A baby bawling like a drowned rat," Cen Duo shot back without thinking.
Qi Luo didn't smile.
He kept looking at him, the usual hint of joking gone from his eyes, leaving only a very quiet pressure.
"You know that's not what I'm asking," Qi Luo said.
Cen Duo's fingers stilled on his cup.
Around them, the other Fallen Knights shut their mouths on instinct.
Someone slowly set his drink down. Someone else tightened his grip on the knife hidden under the table—
Not to use on Qi Luo, but out of old habit: whenever their leader was cornered, they automatically thought Do we smash the place or not?
Cen Duo stared at Qi Luo for a long time.
"Who told you?" he asked at last, voice low. "Those bastards upstairs, or… that little Hunter?"
"Neither," Qi Luo said. "The world itself."
He pulled a sliver of text from what he'd brought back from the Clocktower Transcription Room, and used the Chains to project it into the air between them.
[…a newborn used as vessel. At the moment of birth, a Forbidden Sigil is carved upon its chest. Its Basic Covenant record in the roster is partially veiled from the gods and preserved only in full within the World Base-Covenant's depths.]
[When the world's structure crosses its deviation threshold… the 'key' may be activated. The Rollback Covenant will then run, returning the world to the Initial Version.]
[Execution cost: the key's name will be consumed in the process. All traces of its existence shall be removed from all records.]
Cen Duo's pupils shrank.
The other Fallen Knights couldn't read the archaic script, but they could feel the air grow heavier.
Anyone with a covenant carved over their heart had a built-in reaction to words like rollback, consumed, erased—
The way beasts pricked to the scent of blood.
"So…" Qi Luo said quietly, "the one you carried out of the temple that night wasn't a normal baby."
"It was a carefully prepared covenant vessel for the 'World Recovery Plan.'"
"And also—the key."
When that last word fell, every stray noise in the tavern flattened under it.
Cen Duo said nothing for a long moment.
Finally, he drew a slow breath and set his cup down hard. The impact thudded on the table.
"You here to settle accounts with me today?" he asked.
"I'm here for the truth," Qi Luo said.
His voice dropped; the mark at his chest tightened with it.
"You saved me," he acknowledged. "And you threw me into another fire."
"I have the right to know how deep it goes."
The light in Cen Duo's eyes sank, layer by layer.
"Out," he said suddenly to the others.
The Fallen Knights froze.
"Boss—"
"I said, out." Cen Duo repeated. His tone wasn't loud, but it carried a weight that didn't allow argument.
They exchanged glances, then rose without another word, skirting around Qi Luo.
One of them clapped a heavy hand on Qi Luo's shoulder as he passed—like he wanted to say don't push too hard—but in the end said nothing.
When the door shut, only Cen Duo and Qi Luo were left in the tavern.
And that not-too-big, not-too-small ring of chains Qi Luo was holding up.
Cen Duo leaned back in his chair, head tilted, staring at the oil-stained boards of the ceiling.
"You know why they call us 'Fallen Knights'?" he asked suddenly.
"Not because it sounds romantic," Qi Luo said. "You broke a divine covenant."
"More specific," Cen Duo said. "We broke the Iron Law of the Night Bell."
Qi Luo had heard that night's story in a dozen versions.
The kids' version was a myth: a few temple knights defied the bells and followed a hand reaching out of the abyss to a discarded infant.
The adults' version was politics: disgruntled knights stealing away a noble bastard child chosen as a sacrifice and getting hunted for it.
He had never heard Cen Duo's own version.
Cen Duo brought his gaze back down to Qi Luo.
"That night," he said quietly, "we weren't going there to rescue anyone."
"We'd been ordered to escort the 'key.'"
Qi Luo's heart slammed hard once.
Cen Duo raised his calloused hand and traced a circle in the air—
The motion like outlining the edge of some enormous covenant.
"The temple sent down a secret directive," he said. "Said the World Base-Covenant had passed a contingency, and a 'structural correction trial' had to be prepared."
"Their way of putting it was—'The world wrote some things wrong. Mortals are too noisy. Gods like fighting too much. We should roll back to a stable version.'"
"Roll back," Qi Luo echoed.
"Roll back to before the divine system was built," Cen Duo bared his teeth. "In that version, there's no chief gods' consortium, no temple, no Rust Street—and no mutts like us in armor."
"And you agreed?" Qi Luo asked.
"Didn't matter if we agreed or not," Cen Duo said with a cold smile. "In the clauses, we're part of the God's Blade. We execute. We don't ask questions."
He paused, then looked Qi Luo straight in the eye.
"At the time, you were still in the temple," he said.
"You didn't have a name. They just called you 'the vessel.'"
"They picked you out of a pile of babies," Cen Duo went on. "Ran you through layer after layer of clauses. Said your blood, bones, and Chains fit best."
"They carved the first line of the stolen sentence from the Initial Draft into your chest." He stared at Qi Luo's sternum. "—'All names under Heaven may be rewritten.'"
Qi Luo's fingers curled reflexively.
He'd just seen that line on the fragment, but hearing Cen Duo speak it aloud now, the words sounded like something both gentle and cruel pressed into him.
"When the second chime rang that night," Cen Duo said, "the five of us were called into a chamber deep underground."
"The floor was tied straight into the abyssal pipes." His voice turned flat, like he was replaying a reel of old footage. "They laid you in the middle. Put a ring of covenant stones around you."
"The chief's proxy stood over us and said, 'Tonight we'll start with a little city-level test, see how rollback works. If it goes well, we'll push up another tier.'"
"Up to the world-tier," Qi Luo finished for him.
Cen Duo let out a low response from his chest.
"I didn't have time to worry about tiers," he said with a wry twist of his mouth. "I only cared that once they pressed you, that kid they called 'vessel' would vanish from everyone's eyes."
"I asked them, 'You're going to delete his name?'"
"They said, 'He doesn't have a name to begin with.'"
The spiral at Qi Luo's chest cinched hard.
—Nameless people were easiest to erase.
He thought of all those childhood dreams where he never had a face, just a smudge of shadow wavering under the clocktower.
"We'd been fed temple rhetoric for years," Cen Duo went on. "We could recite it in our sleep: 'To sacrifice for order is the highest honor.'"
"They told us, 'You are the God's Blade. This child is the blade of the world.'"
"'Sign here, and you'll have done something great.'"
Qi Luo knew what "here" was.
—It was an additional clause for the knightly order: provide escort and enforcement for the rollback trial, casualties not counted as normal losses, all dumped into the "honor of sacrifice" column.
"You sign?" Qi Luo asked.
"Half," Cen Duo said.
He mimed writing in the air and stopped his finger on the third stroke.
"I only wrote 'Cen Duo'—two characters," he said. "The third stopped halfway."
"In that moment, I suddenly thought—"
Qi Luo waited.
"—If the world really does roll back like they say," Cen Duo said slowly, "does that mean everything we've ever done, every bad covenant we've signed, gets wiped clean?"
Qi Luo blinked.
He hadn't expected that angle.
"Sounds tempting, doesn't it?" Cen Duo gave a crooked, bitter grin. "To a mutt doing dirty work under the temple floor."
"All we'd have to do is hit the rollback switch and pretend we never knelt, never dragged mortals up to the platform, never signed execution clauses for the gods."
"We'd get to start over."
"Then why…" Qi Luo fought the riot in his chest, "did you not press it?"
Cen Duo was silent for a long while.
"I regret a lot of things too late," he said at last.
"I suddenly looked at that kid," he went on. "You. Lying there, chest carved raw, eyes open."
"I thought you were crying. Got close and realized—"
"Your breathing was just too shallow."
"The temple councilor next to us was laughing. Said, 'Look at that, the vessel's sturdy. Hard to break.'"
"He said, 'You only need to pull the trigger and the world will go back where it should be.'"
A heavy, killing light flashed through Cen Duo's eyes.
"I suddenly felt sick," he said.
"Sick enough to puke."
"Because I realized they were going to use 'the world can start over' to launder every rotten thing they'd ever done."
"But you know what, Little Luo—" Cen Duo bit off the syllables. "The world can roll back. What we did won't go away."
"The mortals we dragged off. The innocent names we executed. They won't be standing in front of us pointing fingers after rollback."
"But we'll remember."
"That memory follows us into any version."
Qi Luo listened, the pain in his chest colliding with Cen Duo's words.
"So you wrecked it," he said quietly.
Cen Duo chuckled.
"I'm no hero," he said. "I just suddenly couldn't stand watching them scrub themselves clean with the word 'world.'"
"When the second chime rang, we lifted you onto the pipe mouth like they ordered," he went on. "When the third rang, I yelled 'Stop.'"
"They said the world doesn't wait for people."
"I said, then maybe the world can wait for a name or two."
"And then?" Qi Luo asked.
"Then I smashed the covenant stone," Cen Duo said.
He chopped his hand down in a short arc. "Stone shattered. The contingency couldn't latch. The Chains over the abyssal mist-sea went wild."
"That was the first breach."
"The second…" He rapped his knuckles on his chestplate. "Instead of finishing the third character, I drew a stroke of 'disobedience' across my own knightly covenant."
"The moment that stroke landed, every honor clause under my name lit up."
"Temple must've shit itself that night," Qi Luo couldn't help saying.
"Sure did," Cen Duo said.
"So they picked the easy answer—labeled us 'fallen,' extended our covenant terms, marked us for recall at any time."
"And then?" Qi Luo pressed.
"Then I grabbed you and jumped into the abyss pipes," Cen Duo said. "The rest, you've heard the bedtime-story version."
Qi Luo went silent.
Fragments of things Cen Duo had muttered in the past came back to him—pipes, shadows, a bargain, forbidden sigils.
So that hadn't been old men exaggerating tales in a tavern.
It was real.
A pack of men written into the world as "blades" had broken the blade's command at the last second.
"What did you trade with the abyss that night?" Qi Luo asked.
"With something that doesn't like being in any clause," Cen Duo said. "All we knew then was—it laughed down there."
"We said, 'Hide this child from the World Base-Covenant's sight for us.'"
"It said, 'All right.'"
"We asked, 'What's the price?'"
"It said, 'You'll find out later.'"
"And now?" Qi Luo frowned. "You know?"
"The extra covenant years were just appetizers," Cen Duo said with a twisted smile.
He tugged at his collar.
Qi Luo followed the Chains at his throat down—
On Cen Duo's Basic Covenant, there was a particularly ugly, unnatural add-on:
[When the vessel again approaches the rollback threshold, the Fallen Knights shall serve as a 'buffer layer' and bear a round of structural impact first.]
In other words—
When the world finally decided to roll back, these people would have to stand at the front and "lose a layer" first.
"Fair enough," Cen Duo said. "We were the ones who stole the key."
Qi Luo didn't bother arguing with that warped "fair."
He just drew a long breath.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.
"From the day I was old enough to understand words, I should've known I wasn't ordinary."
He ripped open the sentence that had been lodged in his chest for years. "Why did you only say 'We picked you up that night' and not 'We almost threw you into the rollback furnace'?"
Cen Duo looked at him in silence.
"Because if you'd grown up knowing you were a key," he said slowly, "you'd have let 'All names under Heaven may be rewritten' burn you out."
"You'd think all you have to do is twitch and the world gets to start over."
"And every time you got beaten down, cursed at, ground underfoot, you'd think—'Maybe I should just…'"
He didn't finish the sentence.
Qi Luo understood it anyway.
—Maybe I should just roll the whole city back.
"You said you came for the truth," Cen Duo went on. "You got it."
"So I'll give you one more truth."
He slowly reached out and wrote a single character in the air.
[Fear.]
"We were scared," Cen Duo said.
"Scared you'd grow up thinking of yourself as a key first and everything else second."
"Scared that the day you hit that button, the only thought in your head would be 'The world owes me,' and nothing else."
Qi Luo blinked.
He'd braced himself for a dozen explanations—leverage, bargaining chips, politics, deals—
He hadn't braced for this one.
"So you decided to raise me like a normal kid," he said slowly. "Feed me the cheapest buns. Let me run wild on Rust Street. Get cursed, get beaten… and hope I'd grow into someone who doesn't slam buttons out of spite?"
"More or less," Cen Duo spread his hands. "Look at you. It worked."
"At least when you found out you were a key, your first instinct wasn't 'wipe this city out.' You climbed a clocktower to read clauses."
"That means our education plan wasn't a total failure."
He half joked, but his eyes were dragging heavy fatigue behind the humor.
Qi Luo watched him quietly.
Everything boiling in his chest—anger, resentment, hurt—twisted around and around until it sank into something harder to name.
"You had no right to choose for me," he said at last. "No right to decide what I get to know."
"Same way you had no right to decide whether the world rolls back."
Cen Duo nodded. "That much, I admit."
He lifted his calloused hand and clumsily wrote a line of small characters in the air.
[Cen Duo, leader of the Fallen Knights, acknowledges that secretly covenanting with the vessel's name to keep this from him constituted deprivation of his right to know.]
[If the New Covenant Council convenes one day, I will submit this as one of my own crimes.]
It was a clumsy confession.
But it was written in the clauses.
Qi Luo looked at the line. The Forbidden Sigil at his chest eased another notch.
"New Covenant Council…" he repeated softly.
Cen Duo arched a brow. "You're already scheming that far?"
"Only saw a few lines on a fragment," Qi Luo said.
"Back then, the old fools like us snuck a talk in too," Cen Duo said suddenly, grinning. "Said, if the world ever really sat us at a table and dragged gods and men together for a meeting, who we'd curse first."
"Thinking back now…" He spread his hands. "I forgot who it was."
"I only remember we all wanted a drink on the table."
"You were still crying your lungs out then."
That line bled off a bit of the fire threatening to split Qi Luo's chest.
"Old Cen," he asked suddenly, "do you regret it?"
Cen Duo blinked.
"Which part?" he said. "Signing half my name, or not hitting the button?"
"Both," Qi Luo said.
Cen Duo thought about it for a long time.
"I regret realizing how filthy it was that late," he said slowly.
"If I'd figured it out before I put on the 'God's Blade' armor, maybe I'd have signed fewer contracts sending people to die."
"As for not pressing the switch…" He shrugged. "Don't."
"Even if we had and the world slid back, with no record for the worst of them—we'd still be standing in that 'new world' with everything we remember."
"That's worse than this."
Qi Luo nodded.
He wasn't "over it." It wasn't forgiveness.
But something in what Cen Duo said loosened a little knot inside him.
The mark at his chest, that bowstring yanked tight for years, slackened by a finger's breadth.
Right then—
A thick Chain in the tavern ceiling flared on.
Not the fine lines only Qi Luo could see, but a "public clause-chain" so heavy even ordinary people could feel the air hitch.
Cen Duo's face changed. "Temple chain?"
Qi Luo looked up.
The Chain pierced through the roof, hanging straight down from the temple district. A light panel dangled at its end.
Characters spilled down it—
Neat to the point of stiffness, stamped with the usual temple solemnity.
[Covenant Council Announcement]
[Upon review, Rust Street resident Qi Luo (roster status: anomalous), has, in recent years, repeatedly and without authorization modified major covenants and interfered with world-level contingencies, constituting a grave disruption of established order.]
[The Council judges that his actions meet the criteria for suspected 'World Traitor.']
[Accordingly, a public trial announcement is hereby issued—]
The lines dropped one by one.
Qi Luo could feel his own name being hooked hard on the Chains, yanking pain through the mark on his chest.
[Seven days from now, one quarter-chime before the Night Bell, a public trial will be held at the temple square.]
[All clauses and acts involving him shall be presented to the city, and the Covenant Council will pass final judgment.]
[All residents of Skycast City may attend or observe remotely as witnesses.]
The last line burned brightest—
[Mortals have the right to witness the judgment of a 'World Traitor.']
Cen Duo swore under his breath.
"They want a spectacle," he growled. "Not satisfied with a closed-door hearing."
Qi Luo stared up at his own name blown up across the light panel.
"Public trial," he repeated softly.
His voice was barely above a breath, but in the Chains it sent out a fine ripple.
—The fragment of the World Rollback Covenant said:
"Before the key is deleted, it has one right: to write a draft of a 'new order.'"
—The Covenant Council's announcement said:
"Mortals have the right to witness the judgment of a 'World Traitor.'"
The two lines overlapped in his mind.
"You planning to run?" Cen Duo asked.
Qi Luo lowered his gaze to him.
"If I run," he said calmly, "they'll say, 'The World Traitor fled judgment. This proves mortals can't be trusted as the world's key.'"
"If I go…" He paused. "They're handing me a platform."
"A platform?" Cen Duo frowned. "That's the gallows."
"And also a stage," Qi Luo said.
This time, the burn at his chest didn't stab—it was a cool, hard clarity.
"They want the whole city to witness judgment on a 'World Traitor.'"
"Then I'll let the whole city witness exactly who that 'traitor' has betrayed."
He raised his hand and wrote two characters in the air.
[Stand trial.]
Cen Duo stared at the words, veins jumping on the back of his hand.
"You understand what you're betting?" he asked hoarsely. "You're betting they'll let you talk."
"I'm betting the world will remember every word spoken in the open," Qi Luo met his eyes.
"Up there, every sentence I say goes into the next page."
"They think they're reading out my crimes."
"But that page can just as well be—"
"The table of contents for a new covenant."
Cen Duo was silent for a long time.
Then he slammed his fist on the table.
"Then we'll go with you," he said through his teeth. "The Fallen Knights are one of the world's own mistakes."
"If old accounts are getting dragged out, we'll drag ours too."
—
Outside the tavern, over Rust Street, the announcement Chains were falling like rain.
On every small church, every prayer stone, every plaza observation stone, the same lines floated up:
[Public Trial]
[World Traitor · Qi Luo]
Seven days from now—the whole city would watch.
And higher still, where no naked eye could see, the fragment of the World Rollback Covenant trembled.
For the first time, the key's name was openly labeled "traitor" in a surface clause.
At the same time, it was quietly penciled into another column:
—Potential convener of the New Covenant Council.