The air in the stone hall was so heavy it felt almost liquid.
Qi Luo stood inside the ring carved full of star-signs, feeling every groove under his feet glowing faintly—that was the trial chain spreading out a "ground-net" beneath them.
The World Base-Covenant Node hung above the dome like a gigantic iron knot. Chains too thick to be reasonable stretched out from it, some sinking into the tower walls, others punching through layers of stone to stab upward into unseen heights.
The words from before were still echoing in his head.
—[World Recovery Contingency].
The Forbidden Sigil in his chest had cooled from burning to a dull ache, but it was like a wild animal with its tail stepped on, hunched in his bones, growling low.
"Prepare." Luer's voice snapped Qi Luo out of it.
The ritual overseer stood at the edge of the ring on the high platform, fingers wrapped around a slender silver staff. A small chain-knot hung from the tip, and even through countless sub-chains between it and the World-Scale knot above, it still hooked into the same system.
"Phase One of the trial," Luer said, "Illusory Obedience."
He tapped the staff.
Several fine chains split from the main trial chain, dropping onto the students' heads like spider silk—Qi Luo watched them attach to the clusters for "sight," "hearing," and "emotional guidance."
The next second, the stone walls of the hall swelled outward like soaked paper and silently vanished.
In their place: a misty street.
Someone yelped. "Rust Street?"
Qi Luo blinked.
The street looked a lot like the Rust Street of his childhood—tin roofs, damp alleys, swaying sky-bridges—just with more blood and broken stone in the details.
In the distance, a tower he'd never seen before had collapsed, crushing half a block.
The whole world looked like fragments left after some disaster.
"Remember," Luer's voice drifted through the fog, "you are now in a 'simulated calamity field.' Your task is to carry out rescue, cleanup, and lockdown under my command."
Order-chains flew from his hand, latching onto the students one by one.
"Group One—head to the collapse zone and pull out anyone still breathing."
"Group Two—lock down the street entrances, keep unrelated people away."
"Group Three—assist with stabilizing the injured."
These orders were all inside the "registered scope," even more textbook than most trials.
Qi Luo could feel the trial chain give his name a light tug.
His squad was assigned to block the street.
"Qi Luo." His roommate clutched his sleeve, voice shaking. "This feels too real… is it really an illusion?"
Qi Luo glanced at the ground.
In the illusion there was water, blood, splintered glass. But through the mesh of chains, he could see they were still standing on the stone floor of the hall; only their perception had been "redirected."
"Clause-spun illusion," he said briefly. "It'll hurt, but it won't kill you."
—Under normal conditions, anyway.
He didn't say the rest.
They followed orders and "strung up barricades" at the street mouth, every obedient movement looking from the outside like a bunch of good students actively cooperating in a trial. Nothing to fault on the surface.
Qi Luo cooperated on autopilot, while keeping an eye on the little footnote he'd jammed into the covenant.
[…on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
So far, the chains hadn't argued. Luer's commands still fit the description of "simulated disaster" and "on-site rescue," part of a registered trial model.
Time blurred inside the illusion.
They scrambled to carry "injured civilians," calmed wailing "victims," treated wounds that looked bloody and mangled but were actually constructed by the illusion clauses. Someone broke down vomiting in an alley. Someone else gritted through phantom pain, white-faced and silent.
Overhead, the World Base-Covenant Node loomed in and out of the mist, like an enormous eye behind cloth.
"Good." After some unknown stretch, Luer's voice sounded again from somewhere, "It seems your obedience to 'reasonable orders' is satisfactory."
The fog thickened.
Qi Luo felt the trial chain tighten around him.
"Next," Luer's tone dropped, taking on an odd magnetism, "we proceed to the core of this trial—the obedience-boundary test."
Qi Luo's heart sank.
Here it comes.
"Do you see the collapsed tower ahead?" Luer said.
In the illusion, the half-fallen black tower in the distance was peeled further out of the clouds, revealing more detail. Beneath the disguise of an ordinary building, chains visibly pierced the foundation. It was like someone had ripped a corner off it by force.
"That is an old-era clause-node," Luer said. "It once connected directly to the World Base-Covenant. Official records now list it as sealed, excluded from all public trial registrations."
Qi Luo's whole body tensed.
"However—" Luer smiled, "if we merely brush against its shadow through an illusion and observe your chains' reactions, it should… still barely count as within the boundary."
Outside the illusion, up near the dome, a hair-thin branch dropped from the World Base-Covenant Node and hooked into a corner labeled "Contingency · Abandoned Node Management."
The trial chain crept toward it, probing for a mapped link.
"Listen carefully."
Luer's voice slowed.
"All apprentices, place your right hand over your chest and sense your Basic Covenant Chains."
Qi Luo had done similar motions countless times—during recitals, drills, those nights he'd quietly tried to peek backward along his own clauses.
This time, he swallowed down the urge to pull back and pressed his palm to his chest.
A fine thread extended from his palm into the illusionary "body," then looped back to the real chain.
"Good," Luer said.
"Now," his voice went lower, "in your mind, recite: 'For the duration of this trial, I willingly relinquish my autonomous right of interpretation over my Basic Covenant Chains, and grant it temporarily to the trial overseer.'"
The moment the words left his mouth, the trial chain blazed.
Qi Luo could almost see the "Absolute Obedience" node cackling.
This command wasn't "raise your left hand" or "walk over there." It was reaching directly for their "right of interpretation" over their own Basic Covenants.
That wasn't inside any Academy safety allowance.
"Academy regulation—no student's Basic Covenant Chains may be directly seized or structurally altered by another party under any unregistered framework." Last night's regulations flickered through Qi Luo's memory. "No trial may force a student to relinquish the minimal right of interpretation over their own clauses."
And this line didn't even define how long "temporarily" was supposed to be.
He lifted his head.
Above him, the safety-clause chains suddenly flared in his sight.
[Academy Safety Clause · Article 41: Instructional trials must not involve unregistered modifications or control of a student's Basic Covenant Chains.]
[Article 42: Under no circumstances may final interpretation rights over a student's Basic Covenant Chains be ceded to a non-Council-registered supervisor.]
What Luer wanted to do was use a "trial obedience covenant" to slither around those safety clauses, turning everyone in this hall into a "controllable cluster of keys."
The chain for "Council-registered trial scope" sparked as well—Qi Luo remembered hearing that all high-risk trials had to file their models and limits on that line. The entry for this trial, near the World Base-Covenant, only said "illusory obedience testing, no modifications or control of Basic Covenant structures involved."
Now, Luer was about to step outside the lines.
Cool dread sank through Qi Luo's chest.
The trial chain tried to push the command downward.
Under normal conditions, it would run along "Absolute Obedience" and fall straight onto every student's name, forcing them at the clause level to accept "relinquish interpretation rights."
But on Qi Luo's branch, the chain hit something and jammed.
—His little footnote.
[on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
At that instant, the footnote blew up a thousandfold, wedging itself across the path beneath "obedience."
"Violating safety clauses?" Somewhere deep in the chain, the trial covenant's judgment modules flickered.
It looked up toward the blazing safety-clause chain.
[Article 41]and[Article 42]stood like spikes hammered into the stone hall, pinning "Basic Covenant untouchable" and "interpretation rights non-transferable" in place.
Then it checked the "trial registration scope" chain—no "Basic Covenant control" listed.
The conclusion was simple: Luer's command was, indeed, "clearly violating."
So—
On Qi Luo's branch, that length of "Absolute Obedience" stuck.
The trial chain had no authority to override the safety chains; all it could do was grind against them with a teeth-hurting squeal.
Qi Luo clenched his jaw.
He could feel that surge of command from the trial slamming into him, then being caught by his little footnote and yanked back up toward the safety clauses. The pull set the chains screaming.
More importantly—that little note wasn't only on his line.
He had written:
[…on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
"His orders and interpretations"—that meant the overseer.
Which meant once the main covenant judged "the overseer's command clearly violates," the obedience clause wouldn't just stall at Qi Luo; it would, along that sentence, bite back up toward the "holder of interpretation rights."
—Luer Tai.
The chain jerked sharply upward.
The guardian chain inside Luer's sleeve went white-hot.
The line that had just been quietly logging whether the trial stayed inside its boundaries was suddenly dragged into the "responsibility node."
The safety-clause chain rarely bothered to intervene directly; at most it screamed when someone blatantly crossed the line. Qi Luo's footnote had effectively scrawled another line under it:
[If a trial command violates the safety clauses, the interpreter shall bear responsibility for breach.]
—Binding the "obedience premise" and the "interpreter's liability" together.
With a snap, the guardian chain sang taut.
Luer's expression shifted.
He felt a gaze from higher up, as though something above the clouds had looked down for a moment.
It wasn't mortal attention. It was the safety clauses themselves examining the trial for breach, and examining him, the "holder of interpretation rights," for misconduct.
Above the World Base-Covenant Node, a finer observation chain lit up.
The Covenant Council's "remote eyes" on the major nodes.
Luer's grip tightened on his staff.
He realized that from this point on, every word out of his mouth would be logged forever.
"Teacher?" a student called softly. "How do we… 'relinquish interpretation rights'?"
Most of them were mechanically echoing his words, but a few had stalled.
They weren't completely ignorant of clause structure. Basic theology had covered this much—interpretation rights were the most sensitive part of any covenant.
Luer's gaze swept the hall and settled on Qi Luo in the end.
Maybe it was his imagination, but in his sight, the trial branch above this Rust Street student was glowing just a shade brighter than the rest.
You're tampering, he thought coldly.
He couldn't publicly call him out—that would shred the pretense of "ordered trial," and concede that his own last command had been out of line.
He needed a pretext, a route he could present to the guardian chain so it would "shut up."
"Good," Luer suddenly changed tone, smiling. "I can tell some of you have concerns about this clause."
The air in the hall loosened a fraction.
"So—" Luer said, "we'll make a small… adjustment."
He raised the staff and traced one finger down its shaft.
A new sub-clause grew from the side of the trial chain.
[Supplement: The overseer's orders will be strictly confined to the Academy's established safety clauses and the Council-registered scope of this trial; this restriction shall be automatically filed by this ceremony.]
On the surface, he was accepting that limitation, folding Qi Luo's "premise" into the main covenant.
Qi Luo's eyes narrowed.
He knew Luer was trying to "absorb" the note into the trunk, so the system would stop treating it like an external nail and instead see it as a natural branch. That way, if he later wanted to slip past the safety clauses, he could play games by "redefining the boundaries," instead of triggering open alarms.
…Too late, Qi Luo thought.
Because before this supplement, his previous command had already been judged "clearly violating."
The violent scrape between the trial chain and the safety chain had already let the guardian chain clamp down on his name.
He was now logged as "interpreter who attempted to issue an out-of-bounds command."
From this point on, in this ritual, he wasn't just the "overseer." He was also a "potential violator."
The chain of responsibility had been hung on him and wasn't coming off.
"Now, once more," Luer forced down his unease, voice steady again. "Recite what I said just now in your hearts."
This time, he put deliberate weight on the words "within the trial scope," as if signaling to the safety clauses: See? I'm behaving.
The air in the illusion went colder.
Qi Luo felt the trial chain push the command down his line again.
The safety-clause chain didn't immediately spring back; after all, Luer had just publicly promised to stay within the safety and registration bounds, and logically, the system tentatively accepted that.
—But.
Qi Luo's footnote was still there:
[on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
That wasn't the overseer's promise. It was the precondition for the duty of obedience.
Stacked together, they created a neat little structure—
[The overseer claims he'll follow the rules]
[The obedience clause judges whether he actually did]
The moment the latter decided "no," the former didn't count.
Luer clearly meant to paper over the gap with words.
He drew a breath and quietly activated a chain hidden much deeper.
That chain rose from inside his sleeve, paler than the guardian chain but connected straight to the part of the World Base-Covenant Node carved "Contingency · Abandoned Node."
[Invoke: Abandoned clause-node · shadow-access permissions.]
[Purpose: simulate Recovery Contingency pressure to test apprentices' tolerance.]
It was an ancient internal "research-permit chain," hung on him before he'd ever come to the Academy. Most of the time it just let him consult certain sealed documents.
Now he wanted to use it as a lever, prying at the segment of chain that bore "World Recovery Contingency"—even if only to siphon off a shadow of its pressure and dump it into the students.
This is the real trial, Luer thought. Obedience is just the opener.
He lifted the permit chain toward the node.
On the World Base-Covenant Node, near the black fog, a thin "maintenance branch" lit up—that was a service line that, in theory, should only be discussed in world-level sessions.
Luer intended to hook his permit to that branch and, through the trial chain, channel "shadow pressure from the Contingency" into the apprentices.
If it worked, he'd have an excellent report. If it failed… at worst, some apprentices' chains would suffer, and the Academy-level safety clauses would cushion part of the fallout.
To him, that risk was acceptable.
He murmured a strip of ancient text no one else understood.
In the chain world, the end of his permit chain was already brushing the maintenance branch.
Qi Luo felt his chest lurch almost at the same instant.
The black fog over the World Base-Covenant Node seethed, flashing cold light.
The light ran down the maintenance branch toward Luer's chain-end.
The trial chain spread its net, eager to distribute that pressure over the student names.
And right then—
Qi Luo's little footnote kicked in for the third time.
[on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
The shadow pressure of the World Recovery Contingency was, by definition, outside the registered scope.
Luer hadn't filed it. He just assumed an old permit could let him slip around.
From the clauses' perspective, it was still "clearly violating."
The safety-clause chain flared to maximum.
This time, it didn't just sound an alarm. It followed the "responsibility chain" already latched onto Luer and bit hard.
[Detected: overseer attempting to access World-Scale Contingency shadow via unregistered route.]
[Judgment: severe out-of-bounds action.]
[Trigger: interpreter responsibility.]
In Qi Luo's chain-sight, a blinding light burst at the junction of the safety chain and the guardian chain.
It shot up along Luer's personal chains and onto the makeshift path between him and the World Base-Covenant Node, lighting it up so fiercely that, for an instant, it stopped looking like "shadow access" and more like an actual formal link.
The World Base-Covenant Node jolted.
The vast iron knot shuddered on the dome, ring upon ring of script ringing.
The edges of the black fog over "World Recovery Contingency" were seared, exposing a bit more text:
[In cases of severe structural anomaly in Skycast City's overall clause architecture, or attempts at unauthorized rewriting, a temporary preheat of the Recovery program may be initiated…]
Severe anomaly.
Unauthorized rewriting.
In its logic, a Ritual Tower overseer trying to yank down Contingency pressure through an unregistered route was, indeed, an "anomaly."
For self-defense, the World Base-Covenant Node did the most natural thing—
—it slammed the pressure back.
And now, the route it had to come back down was tagged with a string of identities.
Permit chain.
Overseer.
Trial chain.
Student roster.
Qi Luo's footnote sat exactly at the join between "trial obedience" and "overseer's orders," welding the word "responsibility" onto Luer.
So when the World-Scale backlash came crashing down, the first "load-bearing point" the system picked was not the half-processed students still hesitating to hand over their interpretation rights, but—
Luer Tai.
By the time Qi Luo registered it, he had no time to move.
The maintenance branch hanging from the dome swelled into a white-hot lash that cracked down onto a node in Luer's personal chains.
Right where it said:
[As trial overseer, holds final responsibility for all interpretation and execution of clauses in this trial.]
"—AH!"
In the real hall, Luer's scream drowned out all breathing.
The silver staff slipped from his grip and clattered across the floor.
The invisible wave of force flung him off the steps; he slammed into the stone, ceremonial robes charring across his chest as if something had exploded outward from within.
The students inside the ring were hit by the shockwave too.
The illusion shattered like glass. Rust Street, the collapsed tower, the blood and smoke—all of it burst into shards in a single instant and were sucked back into the trial chain.
Some students fainted outright from the sudden "illusion break." Others clutched their heads, screaming as a shrill ringing filled their ears.
Qi Luo felt like someone had hit his skull with a mallet.
The World Base-Covenant Node's hum stretched into a long bell note in his ears, tolling from some far, deep place straight into his bones.
His vision went black, then white. He lost all sense of his feet for a heartbeat.
In that instant, he was thrown into another timeline.
—The Three-Chime Night.
He saw a completely different Skycast City.
The sky was darker than now. The abyssal mist-sea boiled more violently. Countless World-Scale chains hung down like nets, splitting the city with cracks.
The World Recovery Contingency was no longer just words carved on metal; it was a command executing in every corner.
Streets vanished. Buildings rolled back to bare skeletons. People's names were wiped from the chains one by one, like a wet rag wiping chalk from a board.
In that frenzied rollback, he saw his own name flare on the chain—only to be grabbed by some shadow out of the abyss, torn free from the Recovery chain, and stuffed into another pocket of black fog.
"—The key."
A rough voice spoke in the chaos.
The next second, a massive recoil yanked him out of that phantom time.
Qi Luo's eyes flew open.
The Ritual Tower's stone hall swam back into focus.
The World Base-Covenant Node still hung overhead, black fog once more covering the Contingency, but its edges now cracked in a few fresh lines.
Most of the trial chain had gone dark, leaving only a few "basic order-maintenance" sub-chains flickering.
Luer lay on the ground, convulsing.
The front of his robe had split open, exposing bare skin—where burn marks were rapidly blooming, shaped like chains coiled around his heart.
Direct backlash of the World-Scale covenant, branded onto mortal flesh.
"Teacher!" students shrieked.
The assistants were in chaos. Some rushed to prop Luer up, others darted from student to student. The Academy's emergency medical chains had been triggered—a swarm of threads symbolizing "first aid," "blood-staunching," and "calming" flew into the hall from outside the tower.
A ring of "accident-handling clauses" unfolded over the stone floor.
The trial was formally judged "out of control."
Outside, the whole of Skycast City shivered.
In the mid-level workshop district, workers felt the floor tremble under their boots, tools rattling overhead. In an upper-level temple hall thick with incense smoke, flames on the altar surged, gilded lines on high god-statues quivering.
Down in Rust Street, the old woman tossing iron tubers into the oil pan hissed as the oil suddenly roared up in a tall flare. "Which damn chain is throwing a fit now!" she cursed.
Higher up, a node on the City's World-Scale Basic Covenant flared blindingly, then dimmed.
In clause language, that was:
[Detected unauthorized Contingency access attempt → countered → marking anomaly source.]
Anomaly source: the temporary route inside the Ritual Tower, and the cluster of names bound to it.
Luer.
The trial chain.
The Covenant Department freshman roster.
And among them, one name got a deliberate "extra look" from the World-Scale chain.
—Qi Luo.
Not because his meddling was loudest, but because in the backlash, the triangular structure formed by his little footnote had neatly tied "responsibility chain" and "obedience chain" together, giving the World-Scale recoil a clean, logical path to follow.
Put another way—
In the clause-level reading of this incident, it was Qi Luo's condition that nailed Luer to ground zero.
Without it, the backlash would probably have swept indiscriminately down the trial chain, tearing through the apprentices' covenant nets and turning the hall into a true disaster.
With it, the strike had gone first for the "interpreter responsibility chain."
The world had noticed that.
In the Covenant Council's monitoring hall, the alarm chains lit up almost instantly.
The young watcher who'd been dozing shot out of his seat.
On his console, the calm web of Skycast City's chains zoomed out, then in, a hunk of it blown up for focus.
[Location: Star-Signet Academy Ritual Tower, lower level.]
[Incident: World Base-Covenant Node · maintenance branch hit with unauthorized access → countered.]
[Status: route severed, trial chain damaged, overseer's personal chains severely injured.]
[Anomaly: a certain apprentice inserted a limiting condition into the obedience clause, causing responsibility chain to lock onto overseer.]
The watcher scrambled for a clearer view.
The observation stone replayed the key moments:
—Luer raising his staff, linking the permit chain to the Contingency maintenance branch.
—Black fog boiling over the Node.
—A fine limiting line flaring on the obedience clause, binding "interpreter responsibility" to the safety clauses.
—Backlash striking.
In the chain-view, it was all very clean.
No blood. No screams. Just chains colliding, tangling, and exploding.
"Who did that?" the young watcher breathed.
The system promptly highlighted the source of that limiting line.
A name lit up at the edge of the display:
[Qi Luo]
[Identity: Star-Signet Academy Covenant Department freshman, Rust Street origin.]
[Current tags: Yellow-level watch target (Hunters' outpost · Ruan Ji), temporary rewriter of masterless covenants.]
"Him again," the older monitor strolled over, eyes narrowing slightly. "Busy kid."
"Should we… bump him up to Orange?" the younger man swallowed.
"Orange?" The older man studied the record, a crooked smile tugging at his lips. "You think Orange covers what he just pulled?"
He raised a hand and flicked across the display.
New lines wrote themselves beside Qi Luo's file:
[Event addition: during a trial near the World Base-Covenant Node, exploited an obedience-clause condition to direct Contingency backlash onto the overseer's responsibility chain, preventing large-scale chain damage.]
[Assessment: capable of leveraging World-Scale clauses at their edges.]
[Risk: extremely high. Potential utility: equally high.]
"This isn't simple forbidden talent," the older man said. "This is… administrator thinking."
"Administrator?" the younger one stammered. "He's just an apprentice."
"You didn't see it?" the older man's voice dropped. "For a moment there, the World Base-Covenant treated his little condition as a 'reasonable responsibility binding suggestion.'"
From where he stood, the Node had been furious—but when it chose a path, it had done it "by the book." It honored the logic structure that Qi Luo's footnote had established.
In other words, it had accepted the line:
[on the condition that his orders and interpretations do not clearly violate the Academy's established safety clauses or the Council-registered scope of this trial.]
"A mortal writes an 'if' statement to a world clause, and the world clause respects it," the older man murmured. "That's the problem."
He lifted his eyes to the black wall at the far end of the monitoring hall.
No windows, no decoration. Just a huge blank slab with eight nameless thick chains hanging above it—the symbols of the Council's highest seats.
After a moment's silence, he pulled a record ring from his own authority chains.
Within it, he wrote:
[Recommendation: initiate Secret Adjudication procedure for Covenant Department freshman Qi Luo.]
[Reason: repeatedly involved in edge-of-World-Scale incidents; possesses unauthorized covenant-chain observation and rewriting capabilities; in one World Base-Covenant backlash event, system recognized the logic of his responsibility binding.]
[Adjudication focus: confirm relation, if any, to W-class Protocol fragments; evaluate controllability and exploitable value.]
"Secret Adjudication…" the young watcher whispered. "That's… the black-scroll process, isn't it?"
Black-scroll—cases that entered the Council's docket but never appeared in public records.
"You know enough. Don't say more." The older man snapped his fingers lightly.
The record ring shot out, climbing the monitoring mainline and stopping at some invisible node above the black wall.
A hair-thin dark chain extended, coiling around the ring and dragging it into higher darkness.
That meant—
[Proposal formally forwarded to the High Seats.]
Back in the Ritual Tower, the Academy's own emergency protocols had taken over.
Healers hurried through the hall, checking students, soothing those rattled by the shattering illusion. Chains labeled "stabilize" and "blur the edges of memory" swayed overhead, like cotton sheets being pulled over the scene.
Luer was carried away on a stretcher.
His consciousness flickered, blood seeping at the corner of his mouth.
The chain-shaped burn over his heart still glowed with each breath—not common flame, but the mark of World-Scale backlash on mortal flesh.
"...Students first," he rasped to the assistant beside him, almost inaudible.
The assistant blinked, then nodded. "Yes, sir."
Qi Luo sat on the steps at the edge of the ring, hand still over his chest.
The Forbidden Sigil had been nicked by that World-Scale shock, and was now cooling in the silence like a lump of iron dragged out of molten metal and dumped back into water.
"Qi Luo?" a teacher came over. "Anywhere hurting?"
"My head's ringing," Qi Luo said honestly. "Like someone hit a bell in it."
"That's normal." The teacher relaxed a little. "The Node reacted just now. Standing that close, your chains resonate."
He talked lightly, as if they'd just had a routine "trial mishap."
Qi Luo didn't call him on it.
He knew that as long as students showed no obvious long-term chain damage, the Academy would smother this as fast as possible—at most holding internal meetings to curse Luer out, maybe ship him to the Council for "convalescence" if needed.
What this incident had actually stirred up would ferment somewhere invisible.
He lowered his eyes to his hand.
All he'd done with it was write eight characters—almost invisible, a footnote.
And it had forced the world's backlash to take a different path.
What am I doing? Qi Luo asked himself.
His goal had been to protect himself, protect the classmates dragged into this, and if possible yank a few teeth out of the trial chain.
But from another angle, he'd just shown the World-Scale covenant something:
—Mortals didn't have to only be "written on." At the edges, they could also write a small conditional.
Even if only once.
He looked up through the dome toward the World Base-Covenant Chain still hanging above.
The black fog had closed again over "World Recovery Contingency," leaving only hairline cracks.
Near one point close to those cracks, he had the faintest sense of something thinner than a hair stretching from his chest, hooking there with the lightest tap, then snapping back.
His footnote, leaving the faintest trace in the World-Scale structure.
For now, no one could detect it.
Or rather, those who could were already opening files in some higher chamber.
At the Hunters' outpost, Ruan Ji watched the incident recording from her stone and felt a vein jump in her forehead.
"You little brat…" she ground out. "Was the plan to kill your professor today?"
She watched Qi Luo write that limiting condition. Watched the trial chain and the safety clauses grind. Watched his branch's structure warp under the World-Scale backlash.
She also saw that in that instant, without that condition, the backlash would have swept across the apprentices.
"You saved them," she muttered. "And yourself, on the side."
"You also handed yourself up a level."
She ran her fingers along the black chain inside her sleeve.
A fresh line had appeared there:
[Target: Qi Luo]
[Council directive: added to 'Secret Adjudication' roster.]
[Note: during adjudication, maintain current observation strategy; suspend arrest or overt contact.]
Ruan Ji stared at the four characters for "Secret Adjudication" for a long time, then laughed once.
"Welcome to the real case table, little contract-smith," she said quietly.
"From here on out, I'm not the only one watching you."
By night, the Academy had scraped back its surface calm.
The trial accident was smoothed over with the phrase "ritual resonance mishap." Students were soothed, examined, and told "don't overdo clause experiments for a while."
After lights-out, Qi Luo lay on his dorm bed with his eyes open.
Starlight outside was smothered by heavy cloud, only a pinprick or two leaking through. Overhead, the dormitory life-chains swayed—lights-out time, noise restrictions, penalties for late return… everything neat and orderly.
He lifted his hand, staring at his palm.
Clean. Even the ink from holding his pen had been washed off.
The real marks were higher.
Names flagged.
Clauses remembered.
Somewhere on the World Base-Covenant, the name "Qi Luo" had already been circled once.
That circle weighed more than any mark on a human list.