Qi Luo was jolted awake by the bell upstairs.
The afternoon's minor classes had been canceled at the last minute—"In the aftermath of a masterless covenant incident, the Academy must conduct a comprehensive safety clause inspection."
He'd lain on his dorm bed until his head ached, then finally sat up, straightened the pile of worksheets on his desk, stuffed his Academy uniform into the closet in a careless wad, and changed back into his old Rust Street coat.
The fabric had been washed so many times it'd faded to a tired gray. There were a few patch jobs at the cuffs. The moment he shrugged it on, he finally felt like he'd dropped back down to solid ground.
The cargo lift ride from the middle tier back down to the lower tier felt shorter than the trip up.
Qi Luo leaned against the iron railing, watching the light filter layer by layer. The blinding white of the temple district dulled to chalk, the harsh light of the workshop district ground down into metallic gray, and below that came the familiar orange glow—Rust Street's own color.
Mist surged in from every direction, heavy with the mixed smells of tidewater, rust, and deep-fried oil.
When the lift gate rattled open, the noise of the streets hit him in the face.
Vendors were shouting. A pack of kids darted past his feet in pursuit of a crow-bird that had clearly been stolen from somewhere. Arguments flared in the distance; near him someone laughed and cursed. Overhead, the Covenant Chains were no longer neatly layered like at the Academy. They were a twisted tangle, like a pile of rope thrown into a corner and left for dead.
Qi Luo took a deep breath. The Forbidden Sigil in his chest seemed to let out a muffled breath of its own.
Rust Street's Covenant Chains might be messy, but they were familiar.
"Back again?" An old woman selling fried iron tubers waved him over. "Little Qi, back down from on high again?"
"Yeah." Qi Luo took the half piece she shoved into his hand. "Put it on my tab."
"It's on there." She grinned, showing missing teeth. "Those tin-can 'fathers' of yours came by for liquor this morning. Said it might rain today; their bones hurt."
Qi Luo's heart gave a little twitch.
"Where are they?" he asked.
"Where else?" The old woman jerked her chin. "Same place as always. The old reservoir behind the broken tower."
That place had once been an armory for a formal knight order. Later it'd been sealed off and, on Rust Street's side, downgraded into "a place where you can hide anything."
It was also the place he'd hidden in as a kid to teach himself how to read clauses.
Qi Luo bit into the over-fried iron tuber. It scorched his tongue numb, but the burn felt solid, grounding.
He followed familiar alleys, turning left and right, slipping past half-collapsed walls. Finally he ducked behind a rusted iron sign that read "STRICTLY OFF LIMITS" and squeezed through a narrow gap.
The old reservoir lay just beyond.
Most of its vaulted roof had collapsed, exposing a slab of dim sky. The water had long been drained out, leaving a deep pit at the bottom, filled with heaps of old armor, broken spears, shattered shields, and mattresses, crates, and clay jars piled together.
A few people sat around a fire.
The fire burned with broken crates and chair legs scavenged from somewhere, the smoke acrid enough to sting his eyes but strong enough to chase away the damp chill at the bottom of the pit. Firelight threw their faces into flickering relief.
Garth sat closest to the flames. The old wound on his right shoulder looked even darker in the light. He wasn't wearing the "porter's jacket" he used at the Academy gates; instead he'd put on a half-suit of rusted iron armor that refused to die—like he couldn't bear to strip off that last scrap of "former knight" from his body.
Qi Luo knew the others too. One was a tall man named Luo Xiu, whose hair was grayer than his beard. The other was a woman knight so thin she was mostly bone; one sleeve of her armor had been cut away to bare an entire arm of burned scar tissue.
Once, they'd all been under some War-God's command. Now, in Rust Street, they were "remnant Fallen Knights."
Qi Luo jumped down, landing on an old shield with a ringing clang.
Heads turned toward him in unison.
"Well now." Luo Xiu lifted his good hand and gave him a mock high-five through the air. "Our little contract-smith fell down from the sky."
"At least you remember how to come back," the woman knight snorted. "That Academy up there hasn't scooped your brains out yet?"
"Not that easy to clean me out." Qi Luo grinned. "Rust Street's rust doesn't wash off."
He walked over and dropped down by the fire, tossing the remaining half iron tuber onto the iron plate by the flames.
"Brought you something. Fresh out of the fryer," he said. "Granny said you already bought liquor this morning, so I saved on booze."
"Stingy brat." Luo Xiu cursed, but his hands were quick as he split the tuber. "Food up top any good? Heard they have whole loaves of white bread."
"They also have whole pages and pages of clauses," Qi Luo said.
He'd meant it as a throwaway line, but the moment the words left his mouth, the circle around the fire went a little still.
Several thick, heavy chain-shadows hanging off the Fallen Knights' bodies shivered faintly.
Rust Street's ordinary folk carried all kinds of thin, brittle clauses—debts, prayers, fines—crisscrossed all over them.
These people's chains were thicker. Heavier.
Qi Luo had been able to see them since he was little, but he hadn't been able to read all the details. All he'd known back then was that the words carved into their chains were harder, deeper than normal—standing for years of service, oaths, battle honors, and—
Betrayal.
This time he deliberately pushed away loose thoughts and really looked.
Garth had two main chains.
One was old, pale in color, the standard "War-God sworn knight's oath"—terms of service, following into battle, obedience to orders, post-war protection… Each section had a corresponding mark, proof that Garth had actually fulfilled each of those obligations.
The second was clearly added later.
That chain was blackish, its carved words uneven, like they'd been chiseled in at different times by different hands.
A guilt chain.
On it were carved the verdicts from that old "desertion ruling":
[At the third chime of the Night Bell, abandoned assigned post without leave.]
[Defied the collective orders of the War-God Council.]
[Engaged in contact with unknown abyssal entity and signed a non-filed covenant.]
Each line ended with a little note: "Added as extra clause."
It was Qi Luo's first time looking this closely.
He found that the tail of this guilt chain had a prominent term of "service extension":
[Original term of service: until the War-God's retirement.]
[Additional term: extend for one hundred years from date of desertion, subject to recall orders.]
And below that, a nastier line of fine print:
[The War-God may at any time execute early recall, to be deemed settlement for the act of betrayal.]
This wasn't a simple "service extension." It was a "you can be dragged back and settled whenever we feel like it."
Qi Luo's gaze crawled up along that black chain.
He saw the same add-on clauses on Luo Xiu, and on the woman knight—only with slight shifts to the term length and details.
Their entire little squad had been hit with an extra blade after they deserted.
"What are you staring at?" Garth's voice came from across the fire.
Qi Luo blinked and realized he'd been staring at Garth's wrist too long.
Once, there should have been a knight's badge hanging from that left wrist. Now there was only a faint black scar. The guilt chain was hooked there, like an invisible lock fastened around his bones.
"Counting wrinkles," Qi Luo said quickly, switching back into his smart-ass mode. "Feels like you've grown a few new ones."
"Get lost." The woman knight kicked him in the sole of his boot. "Is that what they're teaching you up there now? How to run your mouth?"
Qi Luo laughed and let the subject of chains drop.
They chatted idly for a while. Then Garth reached into a beat-up crate beside him, fished out a tightly corked bottle, pulled the cork, and handed it to Qi Luo.
"Try this," he said. "Not Rust Street gutter liquor. Some merchant fell from the upper tiers once, couldn't bear to toss it, so he traded it to us."
A sharp, spicy floral scent drifted from the bottle.
Qi Luo took a sip. The burn made his brow crease, and he still couldn't tell what brand of elite vintage it was supposed to be.
"Smells like money well conned," he commented.
"Everything they drink up there is for conning each other." Luo Xiu snorted. "The real good stuff never drips down."
They bantered on, from the Academy to the cafeteria food and teachers, then to the latest rumors on the Rust Street black markets, and further to what new clauses the City Works Bureau was trying to drop on the lower tier this time.
Qi Luo listened, throwing in a word or two here and there.
In moments like this, he could almost forget the robed peacocks at the Academy, forget the black chain Ruan Ji had hooked to his name.
But that black chain never truly left his mind.
Watching the firelight deepen the lines on Garth's face, he suddenly realized something—
They were running out of time.
Not in the sense of lifespan. In the sense of time written into clauses.
His gaze slipped, quiet and careful, back to the black chain on Garth.
That segment reading[Additional term: extend for one hundred years from date of desertion]showed on the chain as ring after ring of extra carving, like someone had forcibly added new growth rings on top of the old.
Those rings didn't represent natural years. They represented authority—the right to tug this chain and get them back, whenever the War-God felt like it.
As long as the War-God remembered and gave the slightest pull, this handful of Fallen Knights would have to respond to that "recall" anywhere, in any state.
The word "recall" was carved much deeper than the rest.
Qi Luo tried following the grooves of those characters upward.
There, a finer annotation linked on:
[May be used as sacrificial resource.]
[May be used as battlefield filler.]
[May be used as sacrifice in execution of special clauses.]
The last line was even blurrier, like someone had impatiently scraped it later:
[May serve as auxiliary fuel in executions of "W-class Protocols."]
"W—"
On the chain, that letter was rendered as a strange sigil. Qi Luo couldn't parse exactly what it was, but his chest tightened.
He vaguely remembered seeing a similar abbreviation in some internal Academy bulletin he'd flipped through out of boredom.
W-class Protocols.
A special category among the World-Scale ones.
"You're staring again," Garth shifted his shoulder. "I didn't grow a third arm."
"I'm looking at your clauses," Qi Luo said bluntly. "The added bits."
The fire circle went quiet for a beat.
The woman knight snatched the bottle back and took a long swig. Liquor spilled from the corner of her mouth and she couldn't be bothered to wipe it away.
"Add-ons are normal," Luo Xiu said coolly. "We did commit treason."
"But…" Qi Luo thought it through. "Under normal clauses, desertion should be 'loss of protection,' 'frozen battle honors,' that kind of thing. Slapping a hundred years of extra service on you and writing 'may be recalled at any time'—that's not punishment, that's—"
"That's turning us into tools." Garth finished for him. "You use a tool, and then you get to punish it again. Great deal."
He took the bottle back and drank, slow and steady.
Qi Luo stared at those "recall," "sacrificial resource" lines, and a near-blasphemous thought slowly rose in his mind.
—What if he rewrote that part?
Stop short of touching the desertion verdict itself, leave the original service oath alone, and only go after that segment of "additional term" and "may be recalled at any time."
Turn them back into—just ordinary stripped-of-protection deserters, not stock fuel that could be thrown into any fire.
He thought of all the years he'd spent patching tiny clauses on the black market, of tricking drip-gods and petty covenants in the Academy's simulators. Of how he'd made the Drip-God of the Pipes share the blame with him, made a masterless covenant bite itself, made a professor's self-binding clause clamp his own throat—
He wasn't just the little street-side clerk who added "joint interpretation" to loan slips anymore.
He'd touched minor gods, a self-binding clause, a masterless covenant. He'd even brushed up against the black fog over his own Basic Covenant.
"I can try," he told himself.
Try doing it for them, once.
"Garth," Qi Luo said suddenly, "does anyone still manage the guilt chains on you?"
Garth raised a brow. "You asking about who? The War-God himself, or the Council?"
"…Both," Qi Luo said.
"The War-God's busy." Luo Xiu gave a short, humorless laugh. "The whole War-God Council is busy fighting wars for the cities upstairs. Who has time to worry about our pile of broken bones?"
"The Council cares even less." The woman knight poked the fire with her burned arm. "They handed down judgment back then and dropped it. Who still remembers a few names rotting on Rust Street."
"But the clauses didn't forget," Qi Luo murmured. "That line about 'recall' is carved very deep."
The firelight flickered across the chains; those words seemed to glint.
Garth looked at him, eyes like he was watching a child standing at the edge of a cliff.
"What are you planning?" he asked. "Don't tell me you want to erase those lines for us."
Qi Luo, caught out, simply nodded. "I can at least try."
The fire popped loudly.
Luo Xiu almost choked on his drink. "Have you lost it?"
"You think this is like tweaking the Drip-God's 'pipe accountability' clause?" the woman knight coughed, but there was no real scolding in her voice, only a kind of anxious concern. "That hook in us was carved by the War-God himself."
"I know." Qi Luo said.
He really did.
But he also knew—
"You can't keep carrying that forever," Qi Luo said quietly. "This isn't debt. It's treating you like kindling on reserve."
"You think we don't know that?" Luo Xiu smiled bitterly. "Knowing is one thing. The World-Scale chains… we reach for them, we get 'recalled' on the spot."
"I'm not… normal," Qi Luo said, and only after the words came out did he realize how arrogant they sounded.
Thankfully, they all knew that already.
Garth looked into his eyes for a few seconds. In that look passed a whole string of memories—running under the Iron Law of the Night Bell with a baby carved full of Forbidden Sigils, squeezing through pipes; watching Qi Luo tap clauses with a pen for the first time in a Rust Street shack; watching him add a "joint interpretation" line for some poor bastard in the black markets.
"Where would you start?" Garth asked. "From our personal service term, or… that one?"
"That one?" Qi Luo echoed.
Garth didn't answer immediately.
He handed the bottle to Qi Luo, gestured for him to drink again, and only then slowly raised his right hand.
"Look here," he said.
Qi Luo followed his pointing finger.
On a segment of Garth's guilt chain near his chest, there was a knot thicker than the rest.
The words carved there were hard to see at first. Qi Luo focused his sight and could finally make them out:
[Three-Chime Night Bell Protocol]
[Execution target: War-God Sworn Knight Squad, designation XXX]
[Task: Prior to the activation of the World Rollback Protocol, retrieve the key.]
[If the task fails—]
The last line was blotted out by a patch of black.
Not ordinary darkness, but the same kind of "black fog" Qi Luo had seen covering a portion of his own Basic Covenant.
The dark patch on Garth's chest was much smaller, but it hid the words just as thoroughly.
"That night, we were supposed to pull you out of the pipes," Garth said slowly. "We broke the Iron Law of the Night Bell. We didn't follow this clause. We let you live."
Qi Luo's throat tightened. "This clause… was your orders that night?"
"World Rollback Protocol," Luo Xiu said quietly, speaking those forbidden words. "Our squad was a leftover nail from the old world, meant to be hammered in for good by retrieving the key before the Protocol fully engaged."
Qi Luo heard the words and his mind rang like a bell going off inside his skull.
Key.
Recall.
World Rollback.
The Forbidden Sigil in his chest heated, reacting instinctively to those terms.
"The Sigil on you is part of that Rollback Protocol," the woman knight muttered. "Every mark on you is a line on that Protocol's signature page. The clause that makes you the key."
"If not for that…" Luo Xiu continued, "the War-God wouldn't have sent a squad just to watch your birth."
Qi Luo was silent for a long time.
In the fire, a chunk of wood collapsed. Sparks flew and landed pinging on a piece of armor a little way off.
His forehead felt cool. Only then did he realize he'd broken out into a sweat.
"I won't touch that part," he said at last. "That section, I won't touch."
Garth studied him. Some tension left his eyes; some stayed.
"Then what do you plan to change?" Garth asked.
"I start at the edges," Qi Luo said. "From your added service term. From that line about 'recall at any time.' From the fine print that lists you as fuel."
He lifted his gaze, letting it pass across the black chains draped on their bodies.
"I won't go near 'that night's clause,'" he said, each word deliberate. "But I can take a knife to the junk they tacked on afterward."
In his sight, several guilt chains shivered faintly.
That wasn't a structural reaction—it was more like they had heard a promise that was a bit ridiculous.
"You think they were stupid enough to write 'recall' and 'that night' on completely separate segments?" Luo Xiu still poured cold water. "Those parts are tangled together. You pull one, you pull the whole ball."
"Then I'll go through it strand by strand," Qi Luo said.
His tone was calm, but there was a stubbornness in it even he hadn't fully noticed.
Garth looked at him for a long time.
"You need to understand," he said, "you don't owe us. We owe you."
He abruptly veered the topic.
"That night, we stole you out of the gods' hands. We broke the clauses etched into us. You being alive at all has already stretched our guilt chains longer."
"So you want to shorten them for us now," the woman knight said with a short laugh. "Paying us back?"
"…Not only that," Qi Luo said.
That definitely wasn't all.
At the Academy, he'd seen more and more clauses—of mortals, of gods, of the city, of the world. Ring after ring, carving everyone into place.
He'd seen the Drip-God's chain tremble when higher gods tried to shove blame on it. He'd seen a masterless covenant go feral and bite the wrong targets. He'd seen Professor Zhuang Ke Lan get grabbed by the throat by his own self-binding clause.
He'd started to wonder, over and over again, if there was a way to pry a little more space open in places that had been "written shut."
The chains on the Fallen Knights were the part he hated seeing the most.
They were the only ones who'd pulled in the opposite direction when the world decided he was a disposable tool.
"In a way," Qi Luo said slowly, "what you did that night was… rewriting my covenant."
Garth's mouth twitched.
"You could put it like that," he said. "But what we rewrote wasn't a handful of loan slips. It was an entire city's exit button."
His gaze fell into the fire.
"That night's clause was the weight on one side of the world's scales," he said quietly. "You get itchy and start carving words on the rim of that plate, and you can wait to see how the scales stomp back."
Qi Luo didn't argue.
He held out his hand toward the fire, watching his fingertips waver between light and shadow.
This hand had already left marks on more than one chain.
He felt Garth's eyes follow his hand, then move back to his face.
"Listen to me, Qi Luo." Garth's voice dropped, losing its usual edge of mockery. "You want to rewrite things for us—we'll accept the thought."
He paused, speaking each word carefully:
"But—you are not allowed to touch that night's clause."
Qi Luo looked up and met his eyes.
Behind Garth, that little patch of black fog rippled slightly in his sight, like it was swaying in a higher wind.
"I'll find another path," Qi Luo said.
"You can go around Rust Street sticking pins into Chains. You can make professors at the Academy embarrass themselves. You can give masterless covenants new targets." Garth continued, "But if you dare put a finger on the knot from that night—"
He didn't get to finish.
The rest of the sentence was drowned out by a bell ringing far away.
—not the Night Bell yet, just the short shift-change bells for the workers in the afternoon.
The sound rolled down from the upper tiers, muffled by Rust Street's smoke and tin roofs, turning dull and heavy.
Qi Luo listened to the echoes, one after another.
"And then what?" he still asked. "What happens if I do?"
"Me?" Garth gave a thin, cold smile. "I might not have time to do anything. That World-Scale chain will yank you back first and tear you to pieces right where you stand."
"Our guilt chains will get dragged along too," Luo Xiu added. "You'll serve as the fuse to light us up."
"We win, you can't afford it. We lose, we all go down with you."
The woman knight spat. "Like we can afford anything right now anyway."
Firelight cast ugly half-smiles across their faces.
Qi Luo said nothing more.
He knew Garth wasn't trying to scare him, just giving him the bluntest end result in terms someone like them could imagine.
That night's clause was something even the people who had broken it with their own hands didn't dare look at twice.
But once a thought was born, it didn't disappear so easily.
"I won't touch that part," he repeated silently. "I'll start elsewhere."
With the extra service term. With "recall at any time." With the little words that marked them as stock.
Some clauses had been added after that night, by other hands.
Those might not be unpickable.
The fire burned lower. Shadows in the reservoir stretched longer.
Rust Street's noise went on in the distance, but every shout and laugh sounded to Qi Luo like it had chains vibrating behind it.
By the time the sky darkened, he climbed out of the pit.
Garth didn't try to keep him, only clapped him on the shoulder before he went.
"More and more chains up there are going to hook onto you," Garth said. "Remember—every time you move, another loop winds around you."
"One day, you're going to feel like you can't breathe."
Qi Luo nodded. "When that day comes, I'll wind those loops back onto the people who threw them."
Garth chuckled once and left it at that.
Qi Luo left the old reservoir, squeezed back out from behind the "STRICTLY OFF LIMITS" sign, and stepped onto the street again.
Rust Street had far fewer night lamps than the Academy, but they were warmer. The oil lamps at roadside stalls wobbled, looking ready to gutter out at any moment yet stubbornly staying lit.
He paused under a broken neon sign and glanced up.
The chains over Rust Street were a hopeless snarl; you couldn't tell at a glance which belonged to who.
Only very far off, there was one extremely thick chain, much of it veiled in mist, stretched across the entire city.
Some unseen node on that chain seemed to shiver when he left the old reservoir.
Qi Luo narrowed his eyes.
Under his clothes, the Forbidden Sigil on his chest warmed slowly, stubbornly—
As if answering a name that had been spoken around but not touched.
—"That night's clause."