Before the third chime rang, there were only two sounds in the Clocktower: footsteps and heartbeats.
The stone steps spiraled downward, cold and slick with damp, as if the whole tower were a bone rammed into the abyss and the two of them were walking along the marrow seam.
"Don't stop," Ruan Ji said under her breath, fingers locked tight around Qi Luo's wrist.
The echo of the second chime still spun along the stone walls. The Iron Law's clause of [may not stop] tightened around their ankles like an invisible rope, forcing their legs to move in a mechanical rhythm.
Qi Luo's breathing slowly evened out.
The firelight and black chain of the great hall felt like they belonged to another world entirely. Only the dull ache of the Key-Sigil in his chest reminded him: Cen Duo and the others had really burned through their years. That hadn't been a hallucination.
"A few more turns down and we hit the mid-layer," Ruan Ji said. "Below that—comes the abyssal interface."
"Below that," Qi Luo finished for her, "is where they planned to press me down, back then."
"Not 'they'." Ruan Ji corrected. "Those people from the temple."
They fell silent.
They both knew there was one more thing already written into the Iron Law of the Night Bell—
Wait for the third chime.
The chill seeping from the stone grew heavier with each flight.
Mist rose in a thin layer from the gaps between the steps, like fog blooming off a water surface, only it carried the tang of rust and a stale, nameless rot—
As if, a very long time ago, something had been soaked here, dried here, then thrown back into the mist-sea.
Qi Luo knew the third chime was close.
He could feel some power gathering deep within the Clocktower—not the kind of focused will a god used when they stared at you, but something mechanical, rhythmic, getting "ready."
A prompt from the World Base-Covenant flickered at the edge of his vision:
[Night Bell · third chime preparing.]
[Iron Law of the Night Bell · third clause about to apply——]
["After three chimes, anyone inside the Clocktower or at the edge of the abyss who looks back shall be deemed to have 'turned toward the Old Days'; roster status changes to 'voluntary Recovery'."]
"Voluntary," Qi Luo repeated to himself.
The word stuck in his mind like a thorn.
—If you look back, it's you choosing the abyss. The world is merely "respecting your will."
The Iron Law washed its hands of betrayal, down to the last trace of ink.
"You just said, 'I can't look back'," Ruan Ji spoke suddenly. "Afraid of being Recovered?"
Qi Luo hummed in agreement.
He didn't add: what he feared more was what he might see if he did. Things he could never shoulder.
"You're a Key too," Ruan Ji said. "Whether the Iron Law applies to you exactly the same way… none of us have tried."
"You want to try it?" Qi Luo arched a brow.
"I don't," Ruan Ji replied, steady as ever. "But I know you will."
Qi Luo's stride hitched for a fraction of a heartbeat, and the invisible rope cinched tight, forcing his feet to keep moving.
"You think I'll look back?" he asked.
"You've walked all the way here," Ruan Ji said, "just so one day you could."
The words hooked something from the deepest part of him and dragged it into the light.
Ever since the Fallen Knights had carried him off that stone slab, his life had been shoved forward—
Shoved into Rust Street, shoved into Star-Signet Academy, shoved into the temple hall, shoved all the way to the margin of the master covenant's "page."
He'd never had a real chance to "look back."
—Back at that stone platform that night.
—Back at the cities that had been Recovered.
—Back at the names written as "test-run samples" in contingency plans.
He'd always known those things were there.
The Old Covenant had spent endless tricks to hide them: obscuration clauses, Forbidden-Seal Scrolls, the abyssal mist-sea.
The world did not want anyone turning around.
So the world wrote an Iron Law that defined "looking back" as "voluntary Recovery."
Qi Luo's knuckles whitened on the rail.
"If you turn around now," Ruan Ji said, "I won't stop you."
"But I want one promise."
"What promise?"
"Not after the third chime."
Qi Luo didn't answer.
A faint hum, very low, rolled up from deep in the tower.
It didn't sound like a bell so much as some huge piece of machinery slowly lifting a hammer.
The stone under their feet quivered.
Qi Luo knew—the third chime was coming.
[Record: Night Bell · third chime countdown.]
[World self-check reminder: Iron Law of the Night Bell · third clause about to lock.]
Some memory he hadn't touched in a long time stirred in that humming.
He saw a blurry stone platform.
Saw his infant body laid at the center of cold sigils.
Heard his own thin crying smothered by the Night Bell, reduced to a muffled whimper in his throat.
Back then, he'd heard a voice.
Not the priestly cadence of gods' clauses, not the muffled cursing of Fallen Knights, but a low, oddly gentle voice saying something beside his ear.
He'd never held onto the full sentence—only two words:
—"Don't be afraid."
Then the Night Bell rang three times, and every sound was torn apart.
To this day, Qi Luo still couldn't tell whether that voice had come from above the temple, or from the abyssal mist.
He'd just… always remembered it.
Now, in that hum, he seemed to catch an echo of it again.
Like that voice, from very far away, saying "Don't be afraid" one more time.
Qi Luo's step faltered, just a fraction, in the heartbeat before the third chime.
"Qi Luo," Ruan Ji tightened her grip. "Don't—"
The bell rang.
The third chime.
Boom—
This time it wasn't like the first two, just knocking along the stone walls.
The sound crashed down from the top of the tower like an invisible wave, hammering the Clocktower from crown to base.
Qi Luo's ears went to static. The edges of his vision washed white. The Key-Sigil in his chest took the brunt of the blow and flared so bright it hurt to breathe.
[Record: Night Bell · third chime.]
[Iron Law of the Night Bell · third clause locked——]
["After three chimes, any who look back are deemed voluntary Recovery."]
Clause-script lit up line by line along the inner wall of the stairwell, like nooses tightening in concentric rings.
Ruan Ji yanked Qi Luo, dragging his body forcibly downward. "Keep moving!"
Qi Luo took a step by reflex.
The third chime reverberated through his skull, down into the tangle of memories.
—Stone platform.
—Mist-sea.
—That "don't be afraid" voice.
He knew: if he kept going, there would never again be a chance to "turn and look."
The Old Covenant had written the Iron Law precisely to kill that chance.
"Qi Luo," Ruan Ji's voice reached him through the ringing. "You promised—"
"I didn't," Qi Luo cut her off.
His voice was a little hoarse, but razor clear.
After the third chime, he stopped for a heartbeat.
The Iron Law snapped taut.
[Detected: stopping behavior.]
[Assessment: shows tendency toward 'intent to look back'.]
The script on the inner walls flared brighter.
"What are you going to do?" Ruan Ji stared at him.
Qi Luo turned his head.
It was a small motion—just his neck slowly angling upward—but in the clause-world, that instant was like writing two heavy characters across the world's "page":
—Look back.
[Record: carrier · Qi Luo has looked back after the Night Bell's third chime.]
[Per Iron Law, should be deemed voluntary Recovery; roster status changes to 'entered abyss'.]
The line had barely appeared before another slammed into it:
[Current carrier status: pending recovery (suspended), tied to World Recovery Contingency.]
[Conflicts with 'voluntary Recovery' status.]
Two processes collided, neither able to crush the other.
The self-check module blinked.
[Detected: status conflict.]
[Unable to mark carrier directly as 'entered abyss'.]
[Temporary handling: permit brief carrier-perspective deviation as "Recovery preview".]
—Recovery preview.
The world had scraped together a barely-acceptable term to file this breach under.
Qi Luo didn't know how "preview" looked in the depths of the world's logic. He only knew that the moment he turned—
The Clocktower stopped being a tower.
The stairs blurred at the edges, and the stone walls slowly peeled open.
What he should have seen was the way they'd come: the steps they'd climbed, the half-closed metal door, the temple beyond it, Skycast City beyond that.
What met his eyes was not the city.
It was ring after ring of chains wrapped around the tower's outer wall.
Not the black chain, nor the golden temple chains of god-authority, but loops and loops of gray, heavily worn links.
They weren't exactly "chains." More like strips of clause ripped off the page—
Characters crawled across them, restless, never finding a place to land.
They were masterless covenants.
When Qi Luo's gaze passed through the stone and out into the mist-sea, he didn't see simple fog.
He saw an entire field of floating "scraps of paper" and "cords."
Every scrap of paper was covered in words.
Every cord had names hanging from it.
[Purification Contingency, City —— · execution targets: ——] (the entire back half rubbed out)
[Test-run —— · carrier failed; sample city canceled…]
[Campaign —— · combatants' memories rolled back…]
Fragments of sentences drifted through the mist.
More pieces were too tattered to read, only a handful of characters left:
[revoke]
[rollback]
[simplify]
[erase]
The remnants tangled together, wrapping the tower's exterior in a dense mass.
As the mist passed through them, it shredded into fine threads, and in each thread, there was a faint struggling human outline.
—Lost souls.
Qi Luo had seen people bitten by masterless covenants before, and he'd seen tattered remnants of names torn from divine registers.
But nothing he'd ever seen compared to this.
These weren't ghosts in the traditional sense.
They had no full bodies, no faces.
They were "names" torn out of clauses.
Some names had only the family name left. Some had a single syllable. Some had been scrubbed entirely, leaving only a smudge of outline.
They were caught up in the masterless covenants, like kites tied to the tower wall by thin cords, forever dragged behind the words "World Recovery."
They were whispering.
Not screaming. Not roaring.
Just that low, piled-up murmur that never left the throat.
Qi Luo could understand them.
Every mutter was a line of a clause.
"—All I signed was a small covenant for 'clean water for my kid'…"
"—He said 'purification' would only burn the bad ones…"
"—They wrote our city into 'structural adjustment,' said it was for a 'more stable version'…"
"—In the test-run records, I'm only a number now…"
The voices layered over one another.
World fragments that had been rolled back, cities erased as "samples," those written down as "necessary sacrifice to preserve the whole"—
All of them were wound around the Clocktower now, forming a thick "skin of Old Covenants."
Qi Luo's throat tightened.
On one chain, he saw a cracked stone plaque hanging.
The edge markings were in a familiar academy format, but the middle had been gouged with a crude set of words:
[Star-Signet Academy Ritual Test-run · failed]
Under it was a long string of scrubbed-out student names, with a few traces left at the end where the erasing hadn't quite finished.
—Without his interference, every name in that list would have been hanging here.
A little farther off floated a cluster of plague-related remnants:
[Plague Purification Contingency · test-run variant]
[Execution target: excess population (revoked)]
The "(revoked)" was overwritten by later script and stood out starkly.
He knew that was the rewrite he'd forced through at the wind-tower.
But beneath that neat "revoked," plenty of names still hung—
Those who had already died before he arrived.
Their names swayed on the edges of the clause.
"—You came."
"—You finally came to see us."
"—Clause-smith."
Voices poured into Qi Luo's ears in a rush, flowing along the knots of masterless covenants.
He wasn't "hearing" so much as being forced to "read."
Ruan Ji couldn't see everything he saw.
To her, the moment he looked back, the characters on the inner wall of the stairwell stretched like something grabbing at them and twisted outward along his line of sight.
She heard a little of it too.
Not specific words, just a jumbled roar like a distant marketplace, or whispered prayers before a battle.
At best she could make out a few fragments:
"…rollback…"
"…wipe clean…"
"…written wrong…"
"They're cursing the world," she said.
"They're allowed," Qi Luo replied.
He crushed his palm against the rail, the cold stone digging fire into his skin.
"Qi Luo." Ruan Ji called him again, this time with a note of barely-contained panic. "The Iron Law is locked."
"If you don't pull your sight back now, the system might really start… counting you to that side."
Qi Luo stared at the mist beyond the wall, at the sea of masterless clauses and names.
Then, suddenly, he laughed.
It was a bitter sound, but real.
"Remember your hidden priority?" he asked.
"—When gods' interests conflict with mortals', prioritize human rights," Ruan Ji answered without thinking.
"Then what about when the world's interests conflict with the dead's?" Qi Luo asked softly.
The answer came not from Ruan Ji, but from somewhere deeper within that murmur.
The voice that rose up this time was different from the other torn names.
More stable.
Less like a fragment, more like a complete sentence.
"—Little Key."
Qi Luo jerked.
Those two words were not new.
He'd heard them in an infant's memory, in the cold glow of sigils on the stone slab, in between the three chimes of the Night Bell, when someone had bent over him and whispered:
"Don't be afraid, little Key."
He hadn't understood the meaning of "Key" back then, only the rhythm and warmth of the voice.
Now, that same voice-line rose out of the sea of masterless covenants, circling the Clocktower.
"You finally turned around."
"Qi Luo."
The voice called his current name and overlapped it with the old "little Key," blending into something disturbingly familiar.
Something in Qi Luo's chest twanged hard.
The Key-Sigil beneath his sternum flared hot, as if that call had set it directly alight.
His vision swam; his legs nearly gave out.
Ruan Ji grabbed him, yanking him back toward her, dragging his weight a full inch onto solid stone.
[World self-check warning: carrier's perspective deviating severely; 'voluntary Recovery' tendency detected.]
[Status conflict still unresolved; time window for maintaining 'preview' mode is nearly over.]
[Recommendation: immediately terminate backwards-facing perspective.]
For once, the world actually sounded… rattled.
The voice, however, was untouched.
It moved with the drift of masterless covenants, circling the tower like an ancient refrain.
"You see them now."
"You see the lines that were written wrong, then deleted."
"You turned back after the bell."
"You've already broken their Iron Law."
"—Good."
"Because the Iron Law was always meant to be broken once."
Qi Luo raised his head, trying to find the source of the voice in the mist.
He saw a shape.
Not a human form.
Not the bright silhouette of a god.
A deeper patch of black, slightly darker than the surrounding fog, slowly gathering amidst the masterless clauses and dangling names.
It wasn't the abyss itself.
It was more like… an awareness inside the abyss.
It traced out a vague outline in the mist.
Roughly at the height where the stone platform had been all those years ago, pressed against the tower's outer wall.
"It was you," Qi Luo's throat went tight. "The one by the slab that night, saying 'don't be afraid'… was you."
The shadow didn't deny it.
It only laughed, very softly.
The sound was like a pebble dropped in deep water—no echo, but ripples spreading invisibly beneath.
"You finally grew to an age where you can turn around on your own."
"Qi Luo."
"Key."
The voice spoke each word with a patience that felt like it had been written a long time ago.
"Do you know what crime you're committing?"
Qi Luo didn't answer.
He'd been written into a laundry list of crimes already: "unauthorized clause interference," "forcing gods to sign human clauses," "suspected world-level sedition."
None of them weighed as much as this moment.
—Looking back after the third chime.
—Turning toward the Old Days.
He could practically see the Iron Law growing a new line to record him.
The shadow sounded like it heard his thoughts and chuckled again.
"The crime you're committing is—"
"—Looking back on behalf of the world."
"Looking back once, on behalf of all the names sacrificed by the Old Covenant."
"This crime wasn't given to you by the world."
"You chose it."
Qi Luo shut his eyes.
When he opened them again, the mist-sea and the spread of masterless covenants were still there, the whispers of the dead still rolling without pause.
But that familiar voice suddenly dropped lower.
"—Time's almost up, little Key."
"They've already started trying to stuff you back into the Recovery process."
"If you don't turn back, you really will fall."
"If you do turn back…"
It paused.
"…then take the Old Covenant's wound you just saw with you, and keep walking."
Qi Luo swallowed hard.
Ruan Ji's hand was still clamped on him, fingers nearly digging into his skin.
"Qi Luo," she whispered, "come back."
She couldn't see the voice's shape, but she could feel something pulling him toward the abyss.
"You're not the only one pulling," she said.
"Someone's hauling you back from the abyss too."
Qi Luo drew in a breath, deep and steady.
He took one last look outside—at the mist wrapped in masterless covenants, at the sea of names.
Names of those sacrificed by the Old Covenant—
Cities Recovered. People erased in test-runs. Gods erased as "noise."
And in the middle of it, the voice that had bent over the stone slab when he was an infant and called him "little Key."
That voice whispered in the mist:
"Don't be afraid."
Qi Luo turned back.
The motion was slower than before, but utterly firm.
[Record: carrier · Qi Luo has ended 'Recovery preview'.]
[Iron Law of the Night Bell · third clause remains active, but due to status conflict, carrier is not currently being marked as 'entered abyss'.]
[Note: Key has witnessed 'Recovery Residual Layer'.]
[Subsequent effects: unknown.]
The stone walls slid back into place.
The Clocktower was once again only a tight, oppressive spiral of steps.
The mist-sea and the ocean of masterless covenants vanished from sight, as if they'd been nothing but hallucinations in the bell's aftershock.
Only the burning Key-Sigil in his chest remained, reminding him—
What he'd seen had been real.
Ruan Ji exhaled slowly. The hand on her sword still trembled faintly.
"You saw?" she asked.
Qi Luo nodded.
"I saw them," he said quietly. "I saw them—"
"…and it."
"'It'?" Ruan Ji caught the word at once.
Qi Luo didn't explain right away.
He simply pressed a hand to his chest, feeling the sigil's thrum beneath the skin.
"The one who said 'don't be afraid'," he said. "Back on the slab. I thought it was human."
"Now… I don't think so."
"But it's not standing with the Old Covenant."
"It's standing in the abyss."
"Watching how the world throws names away."
Ruan Ji frowned. "Do you trust it?"
"I don't," Qi Luo said. "I just remember it."
"Same way I remember the names wrapped around the tower wall."
He started moving again, continuing downward.
The echo of the third chime still rang through the tower. The Iron Law still held.
He'd already broken it once—
Looked back after the bell.
The world hadn't yanked him straight into the abyss, but it had slapped a hazy label of "preview" over the breach, ripped the bandage off an old wound, and forced the Key to look.
Now that he'd seen it, there was no going back to pretending it wasn't there.
"We go down," Qi Luo said.
"To where the world planned to press the button."
"Carrying what we saw when we turned after the bell."
He didn't know who—or what—that voice in the mist truly was.
He only knew one thing—
From the time he'd been a helpless infant on a stone platform,
Something, or someone,
Had been standing on the far side of the abyss,
Waiting for him to turn around.