That day, the sky felt heavier than usual.
The clouds hanging over the middle tier pressed down so low it was like someone had forced the whole sky a few yards closer. Even the top of Star-Signet Academy's clocktower was swallowed by shadow. White smoke drifting over from the workshop district got trapped halfway up, circling the teaching blocks, and the air was thick with the taste of metal dust.
In the afternoon, Qi Luo had just come out of a Covenant Department practicum room, a stack of practice sheets tucked under his arm.
"We've still got a theology practicum later," his roommate said beside him, flipping through his schedule. "They're taking us to the old shrine in the east wing to do observation notes. I heard the little god there specializes in 'stairwell safety.' Exam week is its busy season."
"Stairwell safety?" Qi Luo raised a brow. "Keeps kids from breaking their necks on the stairs?"
"Pretty much." His roommate chuckled. "It's in charge of stuff like 'someone runs on the stairs and snaps a leg.' The clauses hanging on it are all like 'trip once as a warning,' 'one broken bag strap to avert greater disaster'… Sounds almost kind."
Something in Qi Luo stirred at that.
The Academy had a lot of these little shrines, all dedicated to minor gods that had signed small covenants in different eras—gods of stairwells, lamps, gates, exam discipline. They got a sliver of authority off the World-Scale Covenant Chain, living off students' vague superstition.
The safety textbooks gave them a serious name: "functional guardian gods."
Over on Rust Street, people called them "odds-and-ends gods that watch doors."
"Don't underestimate them," the practicum instructor called back over his shoulder. "Don't forget, all minor gods' clauses ultimately hang on the same main chain. When they go wrong, that's the most common source of 'masterless covenants.'"
"Teacher," a student raised a hand, "can a masterless covenant really bite people on its own?"
"Oh, it can." The teacher looked very serious. "When the god dies but the covenant stays alive, it'll start biting the nearest target it can reach."
He lifted his hand and pointed toward an old building on the east side.
It was one of the earliest teaching blocks at Star-Signet Academy. Its stone steps had been worn shiny with use, copper lamps set into the walls on either side. Inside each lampshade was the image of that "stair-lamp minor god." Most of the time it barely had any presence; only during exam week would its light burn a little brighter at night so examinees wouldn't tumble down the stairs in the dark.
Today, every copper lamp was dead.
"Did this happen when the oil burned out before?" someone whispered.
"Not like this." The teacher frowned. "Today the lamps… it's not the oil that's gone out. The god-image has gone out."
When they drew close, Qi Luo saw it too.
Inside each copper lamp there should've been a tiny god-image—not necessarily human-shaped. It could be a lump of fire, a stone, a lone eye. Now the lampshades were empty, holding only a few flakes of grayish-white residue, like something had been sucked out of them and only the outline remained.
In his sight, the pale gray-gold thread of Covenant Chains that should've been hanging off that image was already broken.
The break wasn't a clean cut; it was a fuzzy, torn mess, as if something had been violently ripped off the chain. The shattered covenant fragments drifted in the air, anchorless, still giving off a faint light.
—That was a masterless covenant.
Qi Luo's first instinct was to take half a step back.
The Forbidden Sigil in his chest warmed, almost imperceptibly—as if it had caught the scent of something dangerous.
The teacher clearly saw the anomaly in the lamps as well and immediately changed the plan. "We're not going into the shrine today. The Academy Safety and Guidance Office already has people on the way. You'll only do observation notes outside. No one is to approach the shrine or the stairwell inside. Understood?"
"Understood." The students answered in unison, but there was a distinct "watching-a-show" excitement in their voices.
"Before we break up, here's some actual substance for you." The teacher looked at the empty lamp. "Remember—when a minor god falls, all clauses under its name drop out of their original supervisory chain and become short-lived 'masterless covenants.' Usually those clauses will auto-recall themselves and get handed back up into a higher-level clause pool. But before the recall, if one of them has a built-in 'automatic execution' trigger condition, there's a chance—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
A sudden uproar burst from the direction of the main building.
A heartbeat later, a shrill scream ripped through the heavy afternoon clouds and exploded down the corridor—a raw, primal terror.
Every head snapped toward the sound.
Qi Luo looked up.
In his sight, the previously calm net of Covenant Chains suddenly tangled into a snarl.
One chain that used to hang under the stair-lamp minor god's name tore free with scraps of covenant still clinging to it and bolted madly in the opposite direction—toward the cable stairs of the new library building.
That chain was gray-gold. The words carved along its surface weren't "stairwell safety" but another type of clause entirely:
[Any who run and roughhouse on the stairs before exams must personally experience one "warning misstep," to reinforce awe toward the stairwell god.]
It had originally been a minor punishment—"trip once" and be done with it. The kind of "learn the sting and you'll remember" light slap that lower-tier students were most used to.
Now, stripped of the god's "moderation," it had become a completely unrestrained execution directive.
Its trigger conditions were just a few words: before exams, on stairs, running and roughhousing.
"Before exams" and "running and roughhousing" lit up countless points across the campus chain-web—every student hurrying along with books in hand, running up stairs to make it to their next session, fell within this deranged chain's "targeting scope."
"Damn." The teacher's face froze. "Everyone stays put. No one moves!"
He'd barely spoken when an even bigger commotion erupted from the new library's outer gallery beside the old building.
There, an exposed stairwell led up from the outside to the second floor. It was the shortcut most students used. At that moment, a whole group of theology and covenant majors were pounding up those steps with armfuls of documents, rushing to their afternoon seminars.
Qi Luo watched the crazed "misstep clause" chain plow into the area around that stairwell like a starving dog.
Above the staircase, several thick chains representing "building safety" flared to life at once, trying their best to block it. But the "god-name anchor point" on this clause had already gone empty. No normal covenant could get a grip on it. All they could do was watch it thrash through the mesh.
Wherever its tail swept, it was as if an invisible hand slammed against the stair railings.
The first unlucky one was a boy at the very top.
He had a stack of books under his arm and was moving faster than usual. One second later, the step under his foot turned slick as oil. He pitched forward, his books flying as his body shot down the stairs.
"—Watch out!"
Someone screamed below. Chaos exploded.
"Misstep clause executing," Qi Luo judged silently.
For every chosen target, the chain would create a "warning misstep" right under their feet, without regard to severity, location—or whether anyone was in a position to catch them.
So long as the conditions were met—stairs, running—it executed.
Qi Luo saw the chain's tail whip around the middle of the stairwell and another girl's foot slid out from under her. Her body toppled out toward open air—there was no guardrail there; below was bare stone floor.
In that instant, every ordinary "safety clause chain" flared to their limits, desperately trying to tweak gravity, thicken the ground's cushioning.
But their authority was limited. They couldn't fully cancel out a deranged covenant directive with an execution history behind it.
A few legs were about to be snapped. A few spines were about to be broken.
Qi Luo's chest seized.
He knew, this was "the first bite of a masterless covenant."
He was supposed to stand where he was, just as the teacher had ordered. Shrink into a normal student and wait for the real "professionals" from the Academy Safety and Guidance Office to come and clean up the mess.
But those people tumbling on the stairs—them he'd lined up with yesterday to recite the Basic Covenant, them he'd just complained about homework with that morning, them who'd lent him a pen.
"Am I really going to watch them fall, clause by clause?" a cold, hard voice asked in his head.
The inside of his breastbone throbbed with a dull ache.
Qi Luo drew a breath and raised his hand.
The motion was so small it looked like he was just lifting his sleeve to block the light.
In his sight, the crazed gray-gold chain swung right between him and the stairwell. Its main body was still wound around the original "stairwell safety clauses," but its tail had flung out completely, dragging behind it the old records of countless "misstep events" and snapping through the air.
Execution target—"violators of the clause."
Once someone triggered it, a loop of "misstep" would latch onto them.
Qi Luo knew he couldn't touch the trigger conditions. Those were too big. Move them and he'd risk setting off higher-level supervisory clauses.
All he could do was meddle with that tiny segment labeled "execution target."
—Switch the target.
He focused his awareness down to the thinnest part of the chain.
In the structure of the covenant, "the person to be executed upon" was just a placeholder. To the system, it was [Object A]. What he had to do now was drag this mad dog's teeth off [Object A] and sink them somewhere else.
It couldn't be himself—not when that would dump every misstep on his own head and splatter him across the stairs in front of everyone. Couldn't be some other innocent crowd either—that'd be no better than doing nothing.
Which left only one option—let the clause bite itself.
Not his body—its own text.
"Execution target = this clause's own execution record," Qi Luo assembled the thought quickly in his mind.
It sounded convoluted, but in covenant structure terms, it was possible—to make an execution directive backbite its own entire execution history.
He lifted his finger and flicked it, casually, through the air.
On the surface, it was nothing—a random point at nothing.
In truth, his fingertip was sharp as a pin.
The pin pierced the "Execution Target A" node and, in passing, inserted a short descriptor right after it:
[—If there is no clearly executable mortal target, then past misstep records shall be treated as the execution target.]
The moment those few words went in, the gray-gold chain jerked like something had yanked hard on its tail.
On the stairwell, the chain had just chosen its next victim—a boy hugging a pile of books, about to skip two steps at once.
Qi Luo saw the chain's head already looped around the boy's ankle.
The instant the short phrase slotted into place, that loop suddenly slackened.
It recoiled like it had been flung backward through time, writhing along its own string of execution history nodes.
Those "records" were all the little trips, twisted ankles, and bruised tailbones that had already happened.
The chain's head tore around those nodes in a frenzy, sinking its teeth in over and over. With each bite it dragged out a sliver of old pain and forced it back into itself.
On the stairwell, students were still stumbling, a few already halfway into falls.
But the lethal wave had been forcibly bent off course—the steps that should've gone completely out from under their feet only grew slick for a heartbeat before recovering their friction. A couple of people crashed down on their asses, seeing stars, but they didn't go flying like that girl had almost done.
The girl who'd already pitched halfway off the side of the stairs felt herself jerked by an invisible hand midair.
She tumbled in a far-from-graceful roll and slammed back onto the steps. The skin on her elbow scraped open in a wide patch, tears springing to her eyes from the sting—but her neck was intact.
Screams, the thuds of books hitting stone, the clack of hands grabbing for rails—all of it blended into a mess. The stairwell was chaos.
From everyone else's vantage point, it was just "we all slipped out of nowhere and somehow didn't go all the way down."
Only Qi Luo saw the gray-gold chain convulsing in midair.
It thought it was "executing," but the system's logic now judged: no clear new target.
That tiny appended phrase was like a cold hand pushing its head into its own past.
—Those countless harmless falls? You suffer them.
The chain emitted a shrill screech only those who could see covenants would hear.
Qi Luo's eardrums flared with pain.
In his sight, the chain's tail thrashed at the air, desperately trying to route around the words he'd inserted—only to find itself entangled. Every path it took led back to "execution history."
It had no choice but to circle back again and again, throwing the penalty where it had already been spent.
A meaningless loop—a clause gnawing on itself.
"Lock it," Qi Luo gritted his teeth.
Lock the clause, not the people.
The gray-gold chain spasmed a few more times and finally began to lose strength.
Its light faded from manic to dull, like a snake that'd been forced to swallow its own tail. It shrank back to the "stairwell clauses" where it had originally hung. The execution segment scrunched into a tight little knot that could no longer uncoil.
It was still there. The clause still existed. But the "execution" ring had been padlocked shut.
Tingles of numbness returned to Qi Luo's fingertip.
He slowly pulled his hand back under his sleeve.
The Forbidden Sigil in his chest throbbed faintly, but it didn't blow up in agony like last night.
This time he hadn't tampered with the World-Scale Covenant Chain. He'd only worked on a minor clause that had just lost its god-name—and he'd used a "fallback execution" option that the clause's own structure allowed.
The risk was much lower than that backward peek at his Basic Covenant.
In the real world, the stairwell was still a mess.
The teacher and a few sturdier students had already rushed over to haul people to their feet. Some kids were crying, some were swearing, some clutched their legs and groaned.
"What the hell was that?" someone stammered. "I swear I had solid footing and then it was just—gone—and something dragged me back?"
"Quiet!" the teacher shouted. "Anyone else who slipped, don't rush off. Sit where you are."
Qi Luo stood at the edge of the crowd, watching the chain that had fallen silent.
He knew what he'd just done wouldn't stay fully hidden.
Not because of the covenant itself—that tiny bit of structural tweak was a speck of dust in the whole system.
The real problem was that the moment he moved, the entire Covenant network had felt a "non-authorized touch."
In the distance, a silver-white monitoring chain that had been quiet flared bright.
It ran from the Academy's teaching blocks straight into a black-walled building in the city—Skycast City's Covenant Council outpost.
In the Monitoring Hall of the Skycast City Covenant Council.
This was a room with no windows. The walls were solid observation stone, laden with dense arrays of chain models.
Several gray-robed monitors sat at their stations. Each had a square console in front of them, projections of chains in different colors floating above—representing the clause activity of different regions and categories.
One monitor was fighting a yawn, eyes glazed over the "building safety" section.
Suddenly, the calm blue-gold chains in that block flickered.
The bundle of gray chains beside them, representing "minor god restraints," went wild, multiple nodes flashing warning red at once.
[Masterless covenant — execution anomaly detected.]
[Location: Star-Signet Academy, East Wing.]
[Object: Clauses under the name of stair-lamp minor god "Step-Lighter."]
"The Academy again," the monitor muttered. "Minor gods are dropping like flies lately."
He was about to forward the record to the "Safety Coordination Group" per procedure when he noticed something off in the chain dynamics.
The gray-gold chain was lunging like mad at a cluster of fine lines representing students.
The instant before it executed, a thread-thin shadow line shot out from one mortal node, silently piercing the "execution target" segment of the chain.
The motion was so quick and so fine that he would've missed it completely if the console hadn't automatically zoomed in on "unauthorized contact," blowing up the moment that pin went in and the minuscule phrase-shift that followed.
That short segment of structure had originally read:
[Target: mortal violators of the trigger conditions.]
By the time the shadow line withdrew, it had gained a nearly invisible annotation:
[If there is no clear target, past records shall be treated as the execution target.]
Then the chain began devouring itself.
All of this took less than a second.
The monitor leaned over his console, fingers sliding through the air to replay that segment three times.
"Who?" he breathed. "Who touched it? Have Safety's people even arrived yet?"
He pulled up the source of that fine shadow line.
The observation stone threw up a fuzzy three-dimensional image—East Wing, near the old building. The kids showed up only as grey silhouettes, deliberately blurred to "protect ordinary privacy."
Only when that thread flashed out did its point of origin get tagged with a tiny glowing dot.
The dot blinked, and the system popped out a data box:
[ID: Academy freshman, Covenant Department C-74.]
[Name: Qi Luo.]
[Status: Rust Street origin, lower-tier examinee.]
[Note: Yellow-level observation target.]
The monitor's pupils constricted.
"Yellow-level?" He raised his hand. "Who tagged him?"
The system pulled up a fuller annotation in response.
[Tag source: Covenant Hunters' outpost, Ruan Ji.]
[Note: Suspected ability to observe covenant structures. Once triggered a self-binding clause (as a chair professor) during class.]
"…She's already got eyes on him?" The monitor clicked his tongue. "So whose discovery is this, then?"
An older monitoring officer stepped over, brow furrowing as he glanced at the feed.
"Masterless covenant. Students falling. Unauthorized pin insertion."
He parsed the rough picture in moments.
"Encrypt this recording," he said coolly. "Send copies to the Hunters' outpost and the Council High Seat Review Panel."
"Priority?" the younger monitor asked.
"At least Orange." The older man considered. "A Yellow-level observation target, in the middle of a masterless covenant incident, voluntarily touching a clause and doing a professional-grade rewrite of the execution target."
He stared at that tiny appended annotation.
That wasn't some panicked scribble—it was the kind of move only someone deeply familiar with clause structures could pull off. Moving the execution target from "people" to "past records" to force the clause to lock up and not trip higher-level alarms.
"They taught this at the Academy?" the older man sneered. "Or did those Rust Street back-alley firms teach him?"
"Should we… order immediate capture?" the younger monitor asked carefully.
The older man didn't answer right away.
He watched the now self-locked gray-gold chain on the feed and thought of an internal memo from a few days ago—about a "temporary masking" anomaly on a certain student's Basic Covenant chain.
Qi Luo.
Same name.
"Not yet," he said at length. "A masterless covenant bites, and he casually locks it down. On the surface, he just saved us a bit of work."
"Which only makes him more dangerous," the younger one said.
"Dangerous things are worth studying," the older man replied. "Send the vid up. Let the ones upstairs see how a runt from the lower districts is reaching into the seams of the world's rules."
He paused, then added,
"And copy a set to Ruan Ji. Tell her the pawn she's watching has started playing his own moves."
In Star-Signet Academy's infirmary, the injured were groaning and whining.
Most just had scrapes and sprains. Only two had taken heavier falls, and even they had no critical injuries. The teacher dabbed medicine on skinned knees and elbows while lecturing them over and over: "Anyone I catch running stairs before exams again, I'll make you retake Introduction to Basic Theology and Obedience Clauses from scratch."
"Teacher…" The girl who'd almost rolled all the way down was still rattled. "Just now… did a covenant go off? It felt like something yanked my leg and then someone else pulled me back."
The teacher blinked, then mumbled, "You probably just grabbed the handrail."
The girl didn't press.
The bolder boys had already turned it into a joke. "First time experiencing a 'warning misstep' clause at point-blank range and walking away without a fracture. I'd call that a win."
They didn't know that behind their confused slips and ugly tumbles, a masterless covenant had taken a chunk out of itself.
Qi Luo stood in the infirmary doorway, leaning against the wall, watching the chaos inside.
The teacher beckoned him over. "You okay? You weren't on the stairs, were you?"
"I was at the bottom," Qi Luo said. "I didn't run."
"Good." The teacher nodded. "Next time the alarm flares, you all squat where you are. No running."
"Got it."
Qi Luo answered and turned away from the infirmary.
The corridor was much quieter now.
He walked to a window and looked out at the old East Wing building.
The empty copper lamp still hung from the wall. The inside of the lampshade was just as hollow as before, gray-white residue trembling in the wind. The broken chains hanging there had stopped thrashing, curled into a knot so tight they couldn't give off any light at all.
Qi Luo raised his hand and pressed it lightly over his chest.
The Forbidden Sigil wasn't hot anymore. Somewhere deep inside, it just tingled with numbness.
He knew he'd just added another line to that invisible great chain.
Not as a written clause in plain sight, but as a record:
[During a masterless covenant incident, made unauthorized contact with a clause and altered its structure.]
"What are you doing?" he asked himself. "Trying to live longer, or trying to get caught faster?"
No answer.
Only a heavy wind slipped through the gaps between teaching blocks, lifting a scrap of paper into a spin midair.
A fragment of the Academy charter was printed on it. On that corner, it read:
[Students have the right to take necessary action when lives are at stake.]
Qi Luo stared at those words for a moment, then suddenly smiled.
"Then let's call that just now…" he muttered, "legitimate self-defense."
In the distance, a black chain on the clocktower shivered silently.
In an office at the Covenant Hunters' outpost, Ruan Ji received a new encrypted record.
She unfolded the observation stone and watched the gray-gold chain's manic outburst and sudden self-lock from start to finish. She saw that nearly invisible thread of a line stretching out from a mortal node.
The path of that line was tagged:
[Source: Qi Luo.]
She watched for a long time.
In the end, she raised a hand and wrote a new assessment onto her own black chain.
[Target: Qi Luo]
[Incident: During masterless covenant "stair-lamp misstep" anomalous execution, proactively rewrote execution target, causing clause to self-lock.]
[Judgment: Possesses the ability to perform temporary rewrites on masterless covenants.]
[Inference: Not back-alley fumbling. Technique is mature. Suspected professional-grade mentor or organized faction behind him.]
She hesitated, then added one more line:
[Suggested risk level: Yellow → Orange (urgent).]
When she finished, she let out a soft sigh.
"Keep saving people like this," she told the empty room, "and sooner or later they'll treat you like a 'system error' that needs to be wiped."
No one answered.
Only, high above, somewhere no one could see the end of it, the World-Scale Covenant Chain gave the faintest tremor at a node deep within its bulk.
As if it had just been brushed, very lightly, by some tiny inserted pin.