It was very late.
The fog over Rust Street hung low, pressing down on the rooftops. Neon lights smeared by it turned into one dirty, muddled blur of color.
Down in the old pipe, the oil lamp was turned to its smallest. The flame was like a tiny heart, beating faintly beneath the three characters for Nameless Firm.
Qi Luo was sprawled over the desk, using a worn-down pen to scribble notes in the margin of a case file.
[Lihen · Function Transfer Case — Follow-up Observation:
Frequency of minor outbreaks in the lower city down by ten percent; noble tower-top epidemic warding chains have been forced to adjust twice.]
"Push it one step higher and the nobles will start screaming," Rosh said around a chunk of hard flatbread of dubious origin. "You really ain't scared those people up there will follow the Chains down to us?"
"They can't follow them down," Qi Luo said casually. "They think this place is dirty."
He said it like a joke, but his hand didn't stop. He carefully recorded every tiny change in every chain.
These weren't reports for anyone else's eyes. They were for his.
A firm trying to live inside the gaps between clauses had to know exactly which tendon it had just tugged.
"You should stop staring at the upper city so much," Garth said, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. "They've got Hunters, the Council, chief gods. On their ledgers, you're dead. That's your one advantage."
"Yeah." Qi Luo smiled. "Only the dead get to work nights."
The moment the words left his mouth, the Forbidden Sigil at his chest went thump—a sudden flare of heat.
Not the usual faint warmth. It was like someone had poured a pot of molten iron off the city's peak, down along the World-Scale Covenant Chains, and straight into his bones.
He jerked upright.
At the same time, the entire underground pipe shook.
Not like a normal tremor. It was the low roar of Chains from the deep layers—everyone felt it.
Rosh's hard bread slipped from his fingers. Sanya shot to her feet in a blur, hand instinctively going to the broken sword hilt at her waist.
Garth opened his eyes; in the dim yellow light, the whites flashed with a thin ring of glow.
"...It's here," he said quietly.
Qi Luo looked up. The Chains in his sight magnified on their own.
In the center of Skycast City, that world-scale Basic Covenant Chain suddenly lit up one segment in his view.
He'd seen that segment beneath the Ritual Tower—near the nodes for "epidemic management" and "population balance," where the chief Plague-God and an entire web of jurisdiction hung.
Now, that segment looked like it had taken an axe to the spine and let out a dull crack.
A section of the Chain went abruptly dark.
A whole block of clauses under the chief Plague-God shifted from gold to sooty black.
[Chief Plague-God · Seat Status: ——]
The line on the Chain flickered wildly several times, then froze into two characters:
[Fallen.]
The stroke for Fallen landed, and the entire epidemic network sagged like a net ripped off its anchor.
Hanging beneath it were countless sub-clauses—Great Plague Contingency, emergency lockdown, post-disaster redistribution, exemptions and clearances… all of them suddenly without a "subject."
Execution targets still existed.
Trigger conditions still existed.
Liability clauses still existed.
Only the "who decides" had vanished.
In an instant, all those covenants were masterless.
Qi Luo could almost hear them screaming.
They were like kites with their strings cut, like mad dogs scented blood, streaking everywhere in the Chain world, frantically hunting for something to bite.
"Which lunatic took down the chief Plague-God?" Rosh swore.
"Not us," Sanya said, her voice cold.
Garth didn't speak. He stared up at the patch of chain-net overhead that was slowly dimming.
A heartbeat later, the real world began to scream.
A wind with no clear source rose above Rust Street, carrying chill and a sickly sweetness, pushing out of every alley and vent slit.
Someone standing at a street stall with a bowl of soup coughed once. The soup's surface bulged with a bubble that popped and threw up a single drop of strange black.
Someone in an upper room rocked in a chair and had just shut their eyes when it felt like an invisible hand pressed down on their chest. Their breathing started to go shallow.
Most of all, the ones who'd already been sick and wheezing—the weight in their lungs suddenly doubled. Their coughs got shoved from a light itch into a tearing pain.
At the street's far end, the iron doors of a little chapel were being pounded on hard.
"Father! Open up! The boy's burning up all of a sudden!"
"I was fine just now—cough—"
Qi Luo pulled his vision back from the Chains.
"Masterless covenants," he said.
Garth nodded once.
"With the chief Plague-God gone, everything hanging under him for epidemic-period contingencies has lost its master," Sanya said, lower than usual. "In theory, they should auto-terminate—but the world-level people got lazy long ago. A lot of them are set to 'if master falls, execute to the end of logic anyway.'"
"What logic?" Rosh demanded.
"Four words," Qi Luo said. "Surplus population."
The same words they'd just seen in Lihen's clause, now in an even higher form.
The difference was—this time there was no god up top to hold the word "moderate." Only pure mechanical clauses running unchecked.
"How big's the range?" Garth asked.
Qi Luo closed his eyes and widened his Chain-sight.
The epidemic bloc on the World Base-Covenant Chain boiled in his view like a pot of soup at full roil. Steam surged from the circle labeled "lower-city epidemic control," spilling outward and drowning Rust Street first.
[Lower-city Dense-Population Zone · Epidemic Contingency: Activated.]
[Targets of execution: population groups with low resource distribution efficiency.]
[Determination criteria: unregistered labor, unpaid taxes, long-term sickness and weakness…]
The criteria were almost identical to Lihen's "Revision One," just scaled up dozens of times; and what it executed wasn't "mild progression for reminders," but—
"Terminal advancement," he said.
Gray-green plague chains like rivulets of ink poured from that section of the World Base-Covenant, circling over the lower streets, hunting for names.
"Starts with the lower city," Qi Luo said. "If they can't 'balance' it there—"
"Then it goes up," Garth finished. "But by then, there won't be much left down here to balance."
Qi Luo drew a deep breath.
"I'm going out," he said.
"You?" Rosh stared. "Even the chief Plague-God is gone—this is a world-level plague contingency coming down. You gonna poke it with your busted pen—"
"On the ledgers, he's dead," Sanya cut him off. "When the contingency looks for execution targets, it skips him. Clauses only recognize the living."
"In other words," she said slowly, "he can walk right along the plague's edge."
Garth looked at Qi Luo.
"What's the plan?" he asked.
Qi Luo pressed his fingers to his chest.
The Forbidden Sigil was so hot his fingertips numbed.
"Masterless covenants will pick their own paths to execution," he said quickly. "I can see what they're about to bite—then, before they clamp down, switch the 'target of execution' to something else."
"Switch to what?" Rosh asked.
"There's nothing in the void," Qi Luo said. "But in the city we've still got other things—wind-towers, sewage, scrap machinery… even the shell of that dismantled world rollback engine."
His eyes sharpened.
"The plague clauses just want to 'execute once'—they don't care what the target is. So we give them a dead target and let them blow up there."
Sanya gave a short laugh. "Sounds like what you usually do."
"This time it's half the city," Garth said. "You sure you can carry it?"
Qi Luo didn't answer.
He grabbed the pen off the desk and tucked it into his shirt, then fished out a few small slips he'd pre-written specifically for "hanging dummy targets" and slid them up his sleeves.
"The Nameless Firm is working overtime tonight, no charge," he said. "Anyone wants to complain, they can do it tomorrow."
He plunged into the darkness at the back of the pipe and scrambled up along the shaft he knew best.
On plague night, Rust Street was like a sheet of paper soaked from the top in ink.
By the time Qi Luo climbed out of the pipe mouth, the street was already chaos.
People dry-heaved against walls. Parents with feverish children shouted at intersections. Everyone else crowded toward the little chapel—its hanging "minor chapel Healer-God clause-chain" stretched white and thin from overload, about to snap.
Worse—those gray-green plague chains weren't really "disease." They looked more like executioners with conditions attached.
They slipped through the air, and every time they brushed a name they started scanning down:
[Target: Rust Street resident · So-and-so]
[Long-term sick and weak: Yes]
[Paid taxes: No]
[Registered labor: No]
[Composite judgement: Surplus.]
The chain immediately wrapped tight around that person.
To the naked eye, it was just someone suddenly hacking hard, their face going from pale to blue to a strange dark purple in seconds.
When Qi Luo reached him, the plague chain had already followed his breath into his chest.
Qi Luo raised a hand and grabbed the tail of the chain in the clause-world.
"Still in time," he told himself.
The plague clause was just about to fire off:
[Execution action: Advance disease course to terminal stage, to lighten structural burden.]
Qi Luo jammed a line in hard after Execution action:
[Target replacement: use nearest non-living carrier instead.]
The execution logic stuttered.
The system frantically inspected the footnote—it cited a tiny, almost invisible "experimental execution clause," the one that allowed temporary "virtual targets" during tests or drills.
"You're insane," his rational mind said. "You're hijacking a live contingency with a test clause."
But the plague clauses had no room to complain—they were just masterless executors.
After a beat of hesitation, they accepted the add-on.
[Searching for nearest non-living carrier…]
Out of the corner of his eye, Qi Luo saw it—an abandoned pushcart, a half-full bucket of wastewater.
"That one," he pointed at the bucket in the Chain.
The plague chain ripped itself out of the man's chest, changing direction like a snake forced aside, and slammed into the bucket.
The surface of the water erupted, foamed gray-green, then slowly stilled.
The man whose breath had been about to cut off stopped for a second, then suddenly dragged in a ragged lungful of air and hacked up a wad of phlegm—specked with a strange black—onto the ground.
"...What the hell—" he clutched his chest, gasping. "Felt like someone had their hands round my neck…"
"Go home and lie down," Qi Luo said curtly. "Don't go out."
The man barely got a clear look at the young face in front of him before he nodded frantically and let his family drag him away.
"One," Qi Luo counted in his head.
He didn't have the luxury to count carefully.
More plague chains were still falling.
Each line was a conditional axe, chopping right down the "surplus population" column.
Qi Luo looked up.
Rust Street in his Chain-sight was a sheet of scorched cloth, gray-green tongues of fire licking in from all sides.
"He can't handle this alone," Rosh's voice came faintly.
Qi Luo didn't turn, but he knew—Garth and the others had already set up several makeshift "dummy target arrays" at alley mouths, cobbled together from scrap machinery and old runic plates, acting as decoy "disease sites" to soak up the plague chains Qi Luo managed to redirect.
"The more I pull, the steadier they hold," Qi Luo thought, feet never stopping.
He ran and rewrote at the same time.
At one tight corner, he saw a plague chain dropping toward an entire family—three people cramped together on one broken bed, the father with old lung trouble, the mother who'd never had money for a proper healer, the child just starting to cough.
The chain made its judgement in an instant:
[All three targets meet surplus criteria.]
"You're surplus," Qi Luo snapped.
He grabbed the chain in the clause-world and twisted it like wire.
[Target replacement: treat this household as a single execution unit.]
[Execution action: advance disease course only for eldest member.]
That was his limit.
The plague clauses still demanded "burden reduction." He couldn't force them to stop entirely, so he rammed the concept of "unit" into the logic, like he was doing a census.
The result—
The father on the bed convulsed in a heavy fit of coughing, face gone chalk-white, breathing rapid and shallow. The mother and child were driven into a flurry of sneezes, eyes reddened, but they were not shoved across the line into terminal stage.
"I'm sorry," Qi Luo told them silently.
Some executions he simply couldn't reach in time. For some, he could only take one blade for them.
The plague clauses were moving too fast. With no god holding them back, the whole lower city was their execution ground.
Qi Luo was sprinting along a conveyor belt of Chains, forcing himself to stay just ahead of it, making his body into a "temporary logic module" for the executor.
The farther he ran, the hotter the Forbidden Sigil burned.
At some point the boundary between him and the clauses thinned—he wasn't just watching them. He was running with them.
"Stop—" he said under his breath at one branch.
A plague chain stretching toward some water tower paused like it'd heard a command.
Qi Luo blinked.
The Key of the World Rollback Covenant.
Keys were built to talk to "contingency execution pieces."
Now that an entire epidemic contingency had lost its god, the Key's innate authority over these execution segments was surfacing—barely, but enough for a faint "priority tone."
He bit down hard on his tongue to clear his head.
"Think later. Save people first," he swore at himself.
Rust Street was just one corner of the lower city.
Farther away, plague chains were already funneling into the middle-city workshop districts.
If he kept circling his own block, he'd drown in the sheer volume.
He looked once toward the rest of the city.
That way lay the Academy, the little chapels of the middle city, all the registries he no longer belonged to.
The plague didn't care about registries. It cared about criteria.
"Move," Qi Luo said.
He kicked off the ground and hauled himself up a vent shaft, weaving between narrow iron ladders and Chains.
The Forbidden Sigil at his chest glowed faintly in the dark.
The workshop district smelled like hot iron, oil, and disinfectant.
When Qi Luo emerged from a maintenance hatch, he stepped into a factory street still grinding overtime.
Workers were slumped over benches fighting sleep.
The plague chains beat sleep to them.
Several gray-green lines dropped from above, skimmed past the workers with "registered labor" tags—those names carried a thin layer of guild clauses that temporarily blocked the "surplus" flag.
The plague chains' gaze dipped lower, landing on a cluster of kids at the street corner who ran tea and washed parts.
[Targets: unregistered labor, unpaid taxes, prolonged exposure to high-risk environment…]
[Judgement: Surplus.]
"Son of a—" Qi Luo swore aloud.
He seized the nearest chain and scribbled in the clause-world with his other hand:
[Adjust execution order: prioritize groups with "high resource occupation and low output."]
Where did "high resource occupation and low output" come from?
From a world-level economic clause in a "cut-the-fat plan."
The plague contingency sat right near that text.
Qi Luo was stuffing a piece of the economic clause back into the plague clause, forcing it to reconsider who counted as "high resource occupation."
The system blinked its nonexistent eyes.
[Reevaluating targets…]
The plague chains that had been about to pounce on the kids jerked in midair, as if yanked sideways by their tails.
They swung in a hard arc around workers and errand kids and fixed instead on the building across the street—the workshop bosses' offices.
Inside, the air was cool; half-empty dishes of candied fruit and meat still sat on the tables.
A boss lounged back in his chair, feet up, reading accounts.
He burped.
Outside the window, gray-green shadows slid silently over the glass.
Seconds later, he clutched his chest, face blanching as his breath hitched.
"Sir? Sir, what's wrong?" his steward yelped.
The monitoring chain in the ceiling flickered.
[Detected: unexpected epidemic-reminder target—upper-level resource controller.]
[Cause: execution order adjustment.]
[Basis: "resource occupation high" definition in cut-the-fat plan.]
In the Chain world, that cut-the-fat clause jolted awake in alarm—and, at the same time, had to admit the logic checked out.
"Now you've pissed off more than the chief Plague-God." Rosh muttered, watching through the Chains.
"The chief Plague-God's already gone," Qi Luo said. "If they dare, they can dismantle the economic clauses next."
He didn't linger.
The workshop district's plague chains were stalled for a moment against the office floors with "high resource occupation."
Next was farther still.
The branching tree of Chains kept unfolding, ring by ring, toward the city center.
"Too many," someone in his head said. "You really think you can catch them all?"
"I can't," Qi Luo admitted. "But I can pick nodes."
He focused his sight on places that would shape "large-scale transmission routes"—water towers, markets, garbage shafts, wind-tower outlets…
Every time he found one, he tagged the associated plague chain with another "target replacement" or "sequence adjustment."
At the water tower, he made the execution crash into the tower wall first, turning "terminal progression" into "water contamination trial run," then relied on Lihen's immune-memory function to make those who drank that water just spend a day with the runs and come away a bit more resistant next time.
At a wind-tower, he simply lashed a runaway plague chain to the blades, letting the execution get worn down over and over by the spinning mechanism, burning itself out inside the tower's frame.
"You're using the wind-tower as a sacrifice," Sanya's voice sounded at the end of one chain.
"Better that than tossing all of Rust Street in," Qi Luo shot back.
He had no idea how long he'd been running.
The night seemed both seared thin by plague and stretched out by his footsteps.
More and more mad-dog clauses swarmed the Chains. His pen, hidden in his sleeve, wore down to a nub. He inserted pins faster and faster, half of his notes no longer even full sentences—just key words.
[Premise — fair]
[Target — non-living]
[Order — high-load first]
Those broken phrases jumped through the clause structures like a mess of insects, but somehow they twisted what had been straight execution paths into a few precious kinks.
Just those kinks were enough to drag who knew how many people back from the edge.
And they completely exposed him.
In the Covenant Hunters' outpost monitoring hall, the alert chains were shrieking hard enough to lift the roof.
On the observation stone, the epidemic routes of all Skycast City were magnified—gray-green lines like overloaded circuits sparking off everywhere.
"The chief Plague-God's fallen," someone bared their teeth. "We're screwed."
"Looks like someone's blocking in the lower-city sector," the monitor shouted. "Here—here—look at these spots—the execution targets suddenly swapped from population to water towers and scrap machinery."
He jabbed a finger at the stone, and the image zoomed on those points.
Rust Street.
Workshop district.
Wind-tower.
All of them had one thing in common—behind each altered execution line, tiny, messy characters had appeared.
[Target replacement—]
[Order adjustment—]
[Fair purification—]
"What dogshit little notes are these?" someone spat.
The older monitoring officer narrowed his eyes.
"Not dogshit," he said. "It's—"
He swiped across the display, connecting the traces of all those modifications and following their source down.
Out of the chaos of the Chains, an almost invisible thin line was drawn out.
It ran through the old pipes under Rust Street, through a few abandoned mid-level interfaces, and finally landed on a name.
[Qi Luo]
[Status: Basic Covenant record—deceased.]
[Actual Chain activity: anomalous.]
The old officer sucked in a breath.
"A dead man's name running inside a plague," he murmured.
At that moment, the Hunters' comm-chain lit up.
[Directive: Regarding the death-verification case of Qi Luo, current progress of Hunter Ruan Ji?]
The old one hesitated, then pushed the command along the line toward the far end of the outpost.
"Tell Ruan Ji," he said. "The person she's looking for is running through this plague faster than anyone."
On top of a wind-tower in plague night.
Qi Luo finally stopped.
He stood on the edge of a mid-city wind-tower, the massive blades pumping air below his feet. Above his head hung a ball of masterless plague chains thicker than anywhere else.
The mass looked like an upside-down flower, layers of gray-green petals. Each petal was a half-executed clause wrapped around another, making a knot that was about to explode.
"This is the main node," he panted. "If it blows here—the wind routes for half the city will carry it everywhere."
He had no attention left for the cold wind clawing at his back.
The Forbidden Sigil at his chest was so hot it hurt. When he raised his eyes, the epidemic sector of the World Base-Covenant burned in his view with razor clarity.
Those masterless clauses were like crazed code, slamming into every interface in the city.
"Let me see," he said, shutting his eyes and forcing his mind into the heart of that gray-green mass.
He wasn't Lihen. Lihen had divine authority over disease.
He was just a name once bound to the World Rollback Covenant.
But when a contingency ran out of control, the Key's authority bled through, barely enough to be used.
In the clause-world he saw the core epidemic protocol:
[Great Plague Contingency Execution · Lower-City Version]
[Trigger condition: chief Plague-God's functions interrupted and world population structure imbalanced.]
[Execution goal: restore population structure balance.]
[Execution method: advance disease course among surplus population to reduce burden.]
[Termination conditions: surplus ratio falls below standard, or manually terminated by authorized party.]
"Authorized party," Qi Luo seized on the words. "The chief Plague-God is dead. That leaves only one 'thing' that counts—"
The World Base-Covenant itself.
He looked up at the immense Chain hanging over the city.
"I know you can hear this," he said silently. "You hate your clauses losing control."
"And you hate your contingencies being abused even more."
He poured everything he had into forcing a footnote beside the Great Plague Contingency:
[Supplementary definition: surplus population shall not be determined solely by lower-city registration or poverty level; it shall be evaluated primarily by long-term stability of the overall structure and actual resource occupation.]
[Supplementary termination condition: when the fear and structural damage caused by execution exceed its projected benefit, the contingency shall automatically enter cooldown state.]
He wasn't saving any one person with this.
He was trying to give the contingency itself a self-destruct condition.
The World Base-Covenant jolted.
Over the wind-tower, the plague mass contracted sharply.
Deep inside, the clause logic went frantic:
[Current fear index: above threshold.]
[Structural damage: in progress.]
[Projected benefit: unclear.]
The little "auto-cooldown" note worked like a shock absorber, stomping a hard brake on the Great Plague Contingency over the city.
The flow of plague chains visibly slowed.
In that stutter, Qi Luo carved out the gap he needed to "bleed off" the biggest knot hanging over the wind-tower.
He pointed at the flower of gray-green.
"Target replacement for execution," he said between his teeth. "Primary carriers: this tower's blades, tower structure, and the runic machinery gathered in the old pipes beneath."
This was the boldest swap he'd attempted all night.
Before, he'd only redirected individual executions into buckets, carts, office walls.
This time, he was forcing an entire chunk of execution onto one wind-tower and the shell of the old world rollback engine.
The plague clauses screamed through their checks in the clause-world—this was a large enough non-living carrier, loaded with old clause remnants and plenty of "clause space" for execution.
The World Base-Covenant also weighed in—
The wind-tower and that scrap machinery counted as infrastructure, not population.
Burning them would cripple air flow for a while; rebuilding was costly, but survivable.
Finally, the execution logic spat out:
[Target replacement—valid.]
The gray-green flower tore free of the air and dropped.
Qi Luo shut his eyes.
An instant later, a deafening blast ripped up from beneath his feet.
The pipe zone under the tower—where the old world rollback engine's heart had once sat—was hit like by a bomb.
Sheets of metal peeled back. Pipe walls corroded into eerie rings. Old machinery belched years of runic ash into the sky, where it exploded into gray-green clouds and thinned rapidly into the night.
That was the contingency being forced to carry out one "terminal execution."
Only this time the target wasn't half of Rust Street. It was a heart that should've been dismantled long ago.
The shockwave hurled Qi Luo backward. One of his feet slipped off the tower's edge; he nearly pitched into open air.
A hand caught his collar and yanked.
Another clamped his wrist like an iron hook.
A cold chain shot along that grip and swarmed over his shoulders and chest.
"Got you," a very familiar voice said by his ear.
Qi Luo jerked his head around.
Ruan Ji stood outside the wind-tower's metal railing, cloak whipping in the wind, one boot braced on the outer ledge. She was like a nail driven clean into the night.
Her lens glinted coldly in the dark.
In it, every messy mark on Qi Luo's Chains was laid bare—from the footnotes he'd just inserted into plague clauses, to the faint dark stripe at his chest.
"Dead man," she said softly. "Running wild on the city's roof."
The Hunter's lock-chain tightened.
Qi Luo felt the Forbidden Sigil rasp against it, pain flickering at his brow.
"...Long time no see," he forced a smile. "Out for a walk?"
"I'm here to collect a corpse," Ruan Ji said.
The Hunter's chain looped his torso once and cinched his arms tight.
[Hunter-exclusive binding chain: cannot be directly removed by target; if forcibly destroyed, will trigger Council accountability.]
She spoke as she lifted her gaze toward the sky, where the plague chains had already calmed a little.
"Nice work," she said mildly. "If you hadn't interfered with the masterless plague contingency, half the lower city would be flat on its back by now."
"So do I get a certificate?" Qi Luo panted. " 'Outstanding Illegal Clause-Editor'?"
"What you get is an arrest warrant," Ruan Ji said.
The Hunter-permission chain slid from her sleeve, ready to snap the "in custody" segment onto Qi Luo's personal clause-chain.
At that exact moment, another deep cracking sound rolled up from the pipes below—the remnants of the world rollback engine finally collapsing after taking the full force of the plague execution.
The whole tower trembled.
Far above, in the World Base-Covenant's epidemic sector, a reluctant sigh went out—the contingency auto-stamped with "cooldown."
[Great Plague Contingency · Lower-City Version: entering cooldown.]
[Cooldown cause: execution-induced systemic fear exceeds projection.]
The plague chains' speed visibly dropped.
Many execution threads reaching downward stalled mid-route, stretching into prolonged mild symptoms or fading entirely.
Coughs still echoed across the city, but they no longer lifted people straight to the morgue.
Everything showed crystal-clear in Ruan Ji's lens.
"You know what you just did?" she asked quietly.
"Barely helped the world hit the brakes," Qi Luo said. "And shoved a little of the blame back onto its own clauses."
"...You just taught the world how to write its contingency," she said.
The Hunter's lock-chain squeezed tighter.
"It's time you came with me," Ruan Ji said. "Qi Luo. One death wasn't enough—you planning on doing it a few more times?"
"I'm already dead on the ledgers," Qi Luo gasped, laughing. "Die again and they'll have to write it under some other clause."
"You think after what you did tonight, I can just let you walk?" Ruan Ji asked.
For a moment, there was something complicated in her eyes.
Qi Luo looked up at her.
Wind gusted between them, blowing his messy hair aside and kicking up the edge of her cloak.
The city lights flickered on and off through the plague haze in the distance.
"You can try," Qi Luo said. "You can drag me to the Council right now. Let them cut my chest open in a Secret Adjudication chamber and poke at that stripe even you don't dare touch."
Ruan Ji's fingers faltered.
Her lens flickered—she'd seen it clearly: that dark stripe coiled at Qi Luo's chest, like a sleeping snake.
She also remembered the line in Lihen's case file:
[Without authorization from the World Base-Covenant, no chief god may directly touch this pattern.]
Hunters catch people.
But Hunters' survival instincts also said: don't throw yourself into the furnace.
"You just made a world contingency listen to a mortal," she said at last. "Someone is going to want payment for that."
"Let them come," Qi Luo said. "I already owe a pile of debts."
He flexed his bound wrists ever so slightly.
The movement was tiny, almost invisible. But the Hunter's chain felt something brush against it—
Not the World Base-Covenant.
The edge of that dark stripe.
The chain hesitated.
[Detected: unidentified high-level stripe interference…]
[Recommendation: avoid forcible arrest under current conditions without authorization.]
The recommendation wasn't for Qi Luo.
It was for Ruan Ji's chains.
She narrowed her eyes.
She could ignore it. She could force him into custody.
The price: writing this line in her report—
"Despite warning from the World Rollback Covenant stripe, proceeded to forcibly escort Key carrier."
She knew exactly what came with that.
She stared at him for a long time.
"You always use clauses to force my hand," she said finally.
"Right back at you," Qi Luo said. "You always use duty to force mine."
They stood facing each other in silence on the tower top.
On one side: plague Chains, finally slowing.
On the other: the Hunter's manacle.
In the end, Ruan Ji loosened her wrist.
The chain didn't fall away, but it slackened enough to leave a narrow gap.
"You owe me one," she said quietly. "Tonight."
"Next time you pull something like this—"
"I'll put you in a box before the plague drops."
Qi Luo huffed a laugh.
"Deal," he said.
He stepped back and, taking advantage of the tower's sway, twisted his wrists through that narrow gap, wrenching himself free.
The lock-chain snapped tight on empty air.
Ruan Ji lunged and caught only a scrap of his shirt.
The torn fabric, still warm, slid out of her fingers.
Qi Luo was already sliding down the inner ladder of the wind-tower, his outline swallowed by darkness and the cooling gray mist.
Ruan Ji stood on the tower, cloak billowing in the night wind.
Far away, a few stray coughs still rose from Rust Street, but the tearing, strangling ones from earlier were gone.
She tilted her head, looking toward the epidemic sector of the World Base-Covenant, still glowing faintly.
"Plague Night of the masterless covenants," she murmured. "And you added a footnote to it."
"Qi Luo—"
She whispered the name again in her heart.
"The next time you move your hand," she muttered, "you won't slip out of my Chain so easily."
The wind took the words and scattered them into the dark.
Plague night slowly passed.
The city still ran hot.
And somewhere deep in an old pipe she couldn't see, the lamp at the Nameless Firm was lit once more, shining on the case files and on a name the world's ledger had already crossed out once.