The wind inside the Clocktower changed.
At first, no one could have said exactly what was wrong. They only felt a thin pressure added to the air, as if someone on the far side of a mountain range was slowly lifting something heavy.
Then the first sound rose up from the abyss.
——Dong——
It wasn't the Night Bell.
The Night Bell's sound pressed down from above the city, carrying the cold weight of temple-forged iron.
This sound, however, drilled upward from beneath the mist-sea. It was even lower than the Night Bell's chime, like some huge, ancient machine very far away slowly closing its gears.
Qi Luo's sternum clenched.
The key-mark under his breastbone felt as if something had just hooked it.
[Breach window: 3 rounds of chimes remaining.]
A line of ice-cold text flicked up at the edge of his vision.
Ruan Ji instantly sensed him going rigid. "What is it?"
Qi Luo didn't answer her. He first lifted his head to look at the world's paper.
In one corner of the master covenant, an item he'd once seen light up in the World Rollback Hall was slowly coming alive again:
[World Recovery Contingency: suspended.]
[Reason for suspension: Fallen Knights collectively breached covenant, burned through atonement clauses, and used their remaining atonement years to temporarily block execution of the contingency.]
[Duration of suspension: calculated from total atonement years of the knights, converted into X rounds of chimes.]
[Current consumption: X–3.]
[Status: suspension nearly ended; auto-restore procedure engaging.]
Qi Luo's throat went dry.
——Back in that hall, what they'd burned wasn't just their "atonement years."
——They'd burned out a block of the World Recovery Contingency's "pause-time."
Standing in that fire, he'd only felt it was blinding.
Now, that blank space they'd bought with their lives was finally about to run out.
The second sound rose slowly from the abyss.
——Dong——
It was half a pitch higher than the first, just as heavy.
Unlike the Night Bell's three iron chimes, each of these seemed to tug on some deeper counter.
Outside the Clocktower, at some corner of Rust Street, a collapsed stretch of wall suddenly "grew" back in full view of everyone—
Bricks flew back into place, cracks healed in reverse, oil stains and graffiti retreated bit by bit into the stone.
A stall owner yelped and jumped back, nearly flattened by the wall rebuilding itself backwards.
"What the hell—"
The self-check module calmly recorded:
[Local rollback test: Rust Street, block X, wall section no. X.]
[Rollback target: version from two years ago.]
[Result: success.]
Immediately after, another line:
[Test rollback has been forcibly aborted.]
[Reason: conflict between new clause "Errors shall not be cleared to zero" and "Old errors must be acknowledged".]
The wall froze in its "two years ago" state for half a second, then seemed to take a shove, snapping back to its freshly ruined look.
The crowd stared, dumbstruck.
"Just now…" the old priest's hands shook. "Did that wall… go back to when we first moved here?"
"And then get slapped back?" a child blinked. "Who's fighting who over a wall?"
The same anomaly blossomed across the city:
On a street in the mid-tier, a freshly hung sign reading "New Covenant Council Seat Registration" vanished for a moment, then re-formed bit by bit in midair;
On an upper-tier noble tower, a window reverted to old-style stained glass, only to be yanked back by the new chains of the clauses;
On a notice wall at Star-Signet Academy, the scroll posting Qi Luo's public trial flickered between "present" and "never posted," as if the timeline itself was debating whether to tear that page of history out.
[Local rollback tests: in progress.]
[World Recovery Contingency auto-restore procedure: initiated.]
The third sound rose from the abyss.
——Dong——
Heavier than the first two, deeper, carrying an irreversible finality.
On the lower levels of the Clocktower, tiny letters lit up along the stone walls.
Qi Luo glanced down and felt his chest go cold.
[Breach window: 2 rounds of chimes remaining.]
[Upon expiry, if no new whole-world clause replaces it, original World Rollback Covenant shall resume execution.]
"Their time's almost spent," Qi Luo murmured.
"Whose?" Ruan Ji asked.
He looked at a line of scorched old carvings on the stone wall—where Cen Duo's generation of Fallen Knights' atonement clauses had once been inscribed.
"Cen Duo's," Qi Luo said softly. "Back then, what they burned in that hall was—"
"—'We are willing to trade our own atonement years for a window of time that disobeys the Recovery Contingency.'"
"The world is counting that window down, piece by piece."
"When it's done, it'll restart rollback the way it planned."
Ruan Ji's face went pale. "Then your new covenant…"
"Is still flagged as trial-run," Qi Luo said. "It's not locked in."
"Right now it's just a test annotation scribbled on the edge of the paper."
"If rollback really hits, that annotation will be wiped as noise with everything else."
"Everything we've written so far—" His Adam's apple bobbed. "—will be as if it never existed."
——
Mid-level of the Clocktower, the spirit-ring still held residual heat.
The first case had just been filed. The mortal and minor-god seats were still processing the shock of that "When divine and human interests conflict, human rights take precedence," while the main gods' seats watched coldly.
Then those three abyssal "chimes" made every chain in the ring shiver.
[Detected: auto-restore of abyssal interface-layer Recovery procedures.]
[World Recovery Contingency status: from "suspended" to "countdown to activation".]
[Breach window remaining: 2 rounds of chimes.]
This line flashed once on every chain linked to Qi Luo.
The Rust Street craftsman jerked his head up.
"What do you mean 'breach window'?" he grabbed the old priest's sleeve. "Who's breaching what?"
Sorrow flickered in the priest's eyes.
"It's Cen Duo and the rest," he said quietly. "That night, they tore up their old atonement covenants and handed themselves over just to buy Qi Luo some time."
"And now—it's time to pay."
On the minor-gods' seats, a tiny disease-reminder god suddenly let out a thin scream: "Did you feel that? Something's pulling us back! It felt like this last time!"
Every god who had personally experienced the "local test-runs after a main god's fall" was shivering along their chains.
On the high seats, the main gods' projections exchanged complicated looks.
They knew what this was—the "World Rollback Covenant" they themselves had written back then was waking from its suspension.
"Rollback… is waking on its own," one god murmured.
"Cen Duo's illegal window is almost burned out," another said, voice cool.
"If the Key wants to use that foolish new covenant to replace rollback, he'll have to finish it in these last rounds of chimes."
"Can he?"
"If he can't, the world goes back to the version we know."
"That's fine too."
——
Qi Luo lifted his head toward a certain corner in the depths of the world's paper.
[World Rollback Covenant · Backbone Summary:]
[1. When mortal resistance, divine authority disorder, and noise indices exceed tolerable thresholds, initiate Recovery procedures, rolling world-state back to a "stable version".]
[2. Use the carrier Key as rollback medium, aggregate error costs, and clear them to zero after rollback completes.]
[3. Recovery process takes precedence over all temporary clauses, including subsequently added minor revisions.]
These three articles were the spine of the entire Recovery Contingency.
The new clauses—"Errors shall not be cleared to zero," "Old errors must be acknowledged," "Convene a New Covenant Council," and so on—were nothing more than side notes scribbled in the margins.
The moment the "rollback script" flipped that sheet of paper as a whole, all the freshly written lines would vanish like stray ink wiped away.
"We're out of time," Ruan Ji said, clutching his wrist.
Through the co-hunter chain, she could feel his bone-deep pain: that line "this name may be deleted at any time" was burning hot, as if the world already held the eraser, ready to use him as the final rag to wipe away its mistakes.
"Shadow," Qi Luo called inwardly.
The unremarkable patch of darkness on the floor shifted.
"Heard it," the Shadow said.
"The world is wrapping things up."
"It gave you a breach window."
"Now it's come to settle the account."
"Didn't you say you'd help me bite down on the Old Covenant's leg?" Qi Luo said quietly. "Now the Old Covenant's trying to rip the whole limb off."
"I'm biting," the Shadow drawled. "But I'm just a piece of error."
"If it decides to reprint the entire page, all I can do is tear harder at the corners."
"If you don't want to be scrubbed off, you'll have to write the new lines harder yourself—before it scrubs."
"Write them harder?" Qi Luo gave a bitter smile. "Turn the draft into the final text?"
"Turn the draft into bone," the Shadow said.
"What you wrote before was—'Errors shall not be cleared to zero,' 'Old errors shall not be treated as never occurred,' 'Temporary administrator may have their name deleted, but errors must remain in the ledger.'"
"When the world labels that 'trial-run,' it's just leaving itself a back door."
"Now your breach window's almost over. Instinctively, it'll choose the path it knows—rollback."
"You need to write it a line before it hits the button that says 'You can't press that.'"
"Where?" Ruan Ji asked. "It's got this many hands."
Qi Luo stared at the backbone of the World Rollback Covenant.
Under the three main clauses, he saw a note he hadn't paid attention to before:
[Appendix: When executing Recovery Plan, if there exists a new clause of equal or higher priority, the world may, after evaluation by the self-check module, choose to substitute or rewrite the Recovery process with the new clause.]
"Who wrote that?" Ruan Ji saw it too.
The Shadow chuckled. "The self-check module."
"Back then it reminded the main gods—'Rollback' isn't the only solution."
"Their reply was: 'Too much trouble. Fine, write the possibility in an appendix and we'll talk when someone produces a new clause.'"
"And then—no one wrote one."
"Until you."
Qi Luo's heart thumped hard once.
"Equal or higher priority new clause…" he muttered. "We do have some."
"'Errors shall not be cleared to zero,' and 'New Covenant Council'."
"But right now, they're just margin notes."
"As long as they're tagged 'trial-run,' the world will always treat Recovery as the more stable option."
"In the last rounds of your breach window," the Shadow's voice came from the very bottom of the abyss, "you need to take those lines out of the margin and make them 'backbone peers'."
"Write them into the seams of the master covenant."
"Write them in a way the world can't pretend not to see."
——
The fourth sound rose from the abyss.
Not a "dong" this time, but two short, clipped metallic "clangs" linked together, like some vast mechanism being shoved halfway through its travel.
Rollback tests in the city started to scale up.
In a classroom at Star-Signet Academy, the course schedule on the wall suddenly rewound three semesters, reverting to "Basic Theology I." The students blinked at it, collectively stunned.
On a street of mid-tier workshops, workers suddenly found that their long-term occupational injuries were gone—but also realized, vaguely, that they'd forgotten every lawsuit they'd spent these past years filing against their bosses.
On a prayer platform atop a temple tower, an old god-statue that had been dismantled long ago briefly appeared, then flickered like a rewinding tape and returned to an empty base.
"Rollback is probing its limits," the Shadow said.
"It's testing how much it can drag back without being fully blocked by your 'Errors shall not be cleared to zero.'"
[Breach window: 1 round of chimes remaining.]
The line carved itself into Qi Luo's vision like a knife.
His sternum spasmed.
"Qi Luo." Ruan Ji's grip on him tightened. "You have to—"
"I know," he cut her off.
He turned and walked straight to the open space directly under the New Covenant Council spirit-chain.
It wasn't the speaking platform, nor any mortal, minor-god, or main-god seat. It was a spot the world had deliberately cleared when the new clauses were first formed:
[Master covenant signing node (inactive).]
The self-check module issued a terse warning:
[Alert: Temporary Administrator attempting to approach master covenant signing node.]
[Current status: New Covenant clauses are trial-run only and do not possess authority to automatically override the Recovery Contingency.]
[Proceed?]
Qi Luo smiled.
"You're asking me?" he said to the world.
"Last time you wrote the Recovery Contingency, you didn't ask a single one of the test subjects."
"Now you're asking."
"Then I'll answer."
He stepped into the open space.
The stone slabs here were colder than anywhere else—not just the cold of the abyss, but the chill of "paper not yet written on."
[Identity check: Temporary Administrator · Qi Luo.]
[Permissions for backbone-clause modification require one of the following:]
[1. Proactive granting by the self-check module.]
[2. Explicit permission in appendix for "new clauses of equal or higher priority".]
[3. Payment via cost node.]
[Current situation: appendix contains explicit allowance for new clauses to replace Recovery process.]
[Cost node: name "Qi Luo" has been marked.]
[Composite evaluation: one-time backbone rewrite attempt permitted.]
The lines appeared one by one before his eyes.
With each one, the carved "this name may be deleted at any time" in his bones was slashed over by fire.
Ruan Ji tried to rush in, but a faint light-wall stopped her at the edge.
"Signing node," the Shadow said. "Doesn't welcome onlookers."
"This is the Key's spot."
"If you go in," it told Ruan Ji, "the world will mark you as a cost node too."
"You willing?"
Ruan Ji gritted her teeth, fists clenched.
"I already put 'human rights take precedence' into my covenant," she said. "I'm not afraid of another line."
"But Qi Luo won't accept it," the Shadow said lazily. "He prefers being the only one carrying the blame."
"He thinks it's cleaner that way."
"Clean, my ass," Ruan Ji cursed, but in the end she stayed outside the light-wall.
——
Qi Luo stood on the signing node and looked up at the world's paper.
The three backbone clauses of the Recovery Contingency were shifting, line by line, from "suspended" toward "active," like a sheet about to flip itself.
[World Recovery Contingency: remaining wait time—]
[One round of chimes.]
[After which it shall automatically override all "trial-run" clauses on the same page.]
He raised his right hand.
Heat surged from the key-mark in his sternum into his fingertips.
It wasn't ordinary spirit-light. It carried Cen Duo and the others' burned years, the Shadow's torn-off will of error, and every line Qi Luo had fought to write in Rust Street, in the Academy, in the Clocktower.
"I'm going to take these lines," Qi Luo murmured, "and move them from draft to backbone."
He reached first for the title of the Recovery Contingency.
In his chain-vision, those words were circled in heavy black ink:
[World Recovery Contingency]
[Priority: Backbone · High.]
Qi Luo didn't strike them out.
He knew that would trigger a backlash—the world would treat it as "unauthorized deletion of core module."
Instead, above that title, in a sliver of blank space, he wrote a new line.
At first it was faint, nearly transparent. As the key-mark burned, it thickened into solid ink:
[General Provisions for World Error Handling and New Covenant Enforcement]
[Priority: Backbone · High.]
The self-check module hesitated.
[Detected: new backbone-level heading.]
[Source: Temporary Administrator node.]
[Conflict: overlaps in function with existing "World Recovery Contingency".]
[Need to determine precedence.]
"Precedence?" Qi Luo chuckled softly.
"Isn't that exactly what you wrote in your appendix yourself? 'If there exists a new clause of equal or higher priority, it may replace the Recovery process.'"
He slid his fingers to the three new-covenant lines:
[Errors shall not be erased through rollback; they must be recorded and corrected.]
[Errors of the past must be acknowledged, with room reserved for compensation and memory.]
[A New Covenant Council shall be convened; all who bear names may participate in discussing future clauses.]
Originally, each had been tagged—
[Status: trial-run · supplemental clause.]
As his fingertips passed over them, the chains quivered.
"I want to promote them," Qi Luo said.
"Promote them to sit at the same level as the Recovery Contingency."
"Or…" He drew a deep breath. "A little higher."
The key-mark flared, incandescent.
He felt like a piece of meat pressed onto a hot iron plate, the world's gaze pressing in from every side.
[Warning: Temporary Administrator attempting to elevate clause priority.]
[Target clauses in fundamental conflict with existing backbone clauses.]
[Note: if elevation succeeds, Recovery Contingency will be downgraded to "backup protocol".]
[Cost must be paid via cost node.]
[Cost node: Qi Luo.]
[Current status: deletable name.]
Outside the light-wall, Ruan Ji saw a pale "deletion frame" appear around Qi Luo—like someone had drawn a dotted box around his name.
The dotted lines brightened and dimmed with his breathing.
"Qi Luo!" she couldn't help shouting. "Stop!"
He didn't.
"World," he said inwardly.
"Didn't you say—errors shall not be cleared to zero?"
"Then write your own past mistake under this new heading."
"You either admit you missed it and learn to keep a ledger."
"Or you keep hitting rollback."
"But this time—you delete me first."
He pressed his palm onto the line "Errors shall not be erased through rollback."
[Request: elevate this clause from "supplemental · trial-run" to "Backbone · High" and let it share layer with the World Recovery Contingency.]
"Cost?" the world asked coldly.
"My name," Qi Luo replied.
"Didn't you already write it? 'This name may be deleted at any time.'"
"Use it as collateral."
"I'm putting my deletable name up to buy your 'no clearing to zero.'"
——
The fifth sound rose from the abyss.
This time it wasn't a drum or a bell. It sounded like a colossal current of water suddenly reversing course.
Rollback tests in the city jumped from "local probe" to "regional reload."
On one row of buildings in Rust Street, the walls shed ten years of grime and flaked paint, returning to the clean white of a fresh coat. Stains vanished. A child's scars briefly vanished from his face—
In the same mid-tier workshop street as before, workers once again found their bodies free of work injuries, and once again realized they'd somehow forgotten all those lawsuits with their bosses—
On a noble family's ancestry wall in the upper-tier, the entries for the last three generations of wastrel sons and bankrupt heirs vanished for a moment, the house crest's cracks healed, and every "shame" was smoothed away.
[Rollback coverage: 10%.]
[Rollback target time: varies by region according to respective stable versions.]
[Note: New Covenant clauses attempting to block parts of the reload.]
People caught in the rollback saw white light explode behind their eyes. Many memories were forcibly ripped from their minds, then slammed back in the next instant.
Some clutched their heads and wept. Some stared around in a daze.
"What just happened?"
"I feel like I… forgot something and then remembered again…"
"Are we numbers on a scroll?"
——
Inside the signing node's light-wall, Qi Luo could barely stand.
The stone slab beneath his feet was turning transparent. Below it, the abyssal mist-sea churned.
The world was weighing its options.
In its view, this was an extremely expensive computation:
[Option A:]
[Restore Recovery Contingency as sole high-priority backbone.]
[Result: world rolls back to its stable version; errors cleared to zero; carrier Key consumed.]
[Option B:]
[Promote "General Provisions for World Error Handling and New Covenant Enforcement" to new backbone, downgrade Recovery Contingency to backup protocol.]
[Result: errors recorded and must be corrected; New Covenant Council continues to operate; carrier Key serves as cost node, name deletable at any time.]
[Comparison:]
[A: short-term stability, heavy reliance on rollback.]
[B: more noise in the short term; lower probability of repeated errors in the long term.]
[Self-check module recommendation:]
[From system evolution standpoint, B is more conducive to long-term stability.]
[From inertia standpoint, A is easier.]
The world paused.
It was a system fond of laziness, but it also had a torn-off "all names may be rewritten" flailing in the abyss.
That torn fragment of error—the Shadow—had its teeth sunk into one end of the Recovery Contingency's black chain at the bottom of the abyss.
"Pick B," it said quietly to the world.
"This once—don't throw me away again."
At the moment Qi Luo felt his scalp crawling, he saw the world's response.
Not in sound, but in lines of text slowly surfacing:
[Backbone-layer rewrite:]
[New backbone framework "General Provisions for World Error Handling and New Covenant Enforcement" added at a level equal or superior to the Recovery Contingency.]
[Includes: errors shall not be cleared to zero; old errors must be kept on record; convening of the New Covenant Council, etc.]
[Recovery Contingency: downgraded to "backup protocol". Only when the New Covenant Council has completely failed, world structure is on the verge of collapse, and no alternatives exist may it be invoked via special procedure.]
[When invoked, error records must not be erased; it may only serve as a means of "restarting parts of the structure".]
Qi Luo's chest tightened.
The line "Errors shall not be erased through rollback" thickened before his eyes on the paper, growing from a margin note to black text at the same height as "Recovery Contingency."
"Did it work?" Ruan Ji rasped.
"Not completely," Qi Luo laughed, out of breath.
"But—"
"—From now on, whenever the world reaches for the rollback key, it has to look at these lines first."
"It can't pretend it never wrote its own errors."
The sixth sound rose from the abyss.
This time, the tone suddenly climbed, then snapped off.
All the buildings and memories that had been flowing "backward" hit some invisible wall and froze halfway.
On that row of Rust Street walls, half the paint was old, half newly filthy, like an interlayer;
The workshop workers' injuries were half restored, half still there;
On the noble family's ancestry wall, one half gleamed with airbrushed glory, the other half still carried the line, "In this generation, a disinherited son was stripped of succession for involvement in the Rust Street incident."
[Rollback progress: halted at 27%.]
[Reason: new backbone clauses "Errors shall not be cleared to zero" and "Old errors must be kept on record" have taken effect, forbidding complete erasure of existing errors.]
[Recovery Contingency status: from "activation countdown" to "backup protocol".]
[Breach window: exhausted.]
[Fallen Knights' atonement years: fully burned.]
In Qi Luo's vision, Cen Duo and the others' names slowly faded from the "breach buffer node" column.
They'd already been burned to ash back in that hall of spirit-fire. Only their names had been left hanging on the ledger.
Now that line was rewritten by the world as:
[Cen Duo et al. · Fallen Knights: traded their remaining atonement years as one of the conditions for permanently downgrading the Recovery Contingency to backup protocol.]
[Status: complete.]
[Evaluation: major breach of covenant, and also part of the cost for this New Covenant attempt.]
Qi Luo's throat tightened.
He reached out and closed his hand on empty air—like trying to grab the heavy shove that had once landed on his shoulder that night.
He caught nothing.
Only the "this name may be deleted at any time" carved in his sternum was slashed over, hard, by the world.
[Cost node status update:]
[Qi Luo · Temporary Administrator: has completed one backbone rewrite.]
[Current deletion cost: extremely high.]
[Note: deleting this name shall be considered a "system attempt to reboot the Recovery Contingency", and will require special review by the New Covenant Council.]
The world had not given up its right to delete him.
It had merely turned "delete him" from a button it could press casually into a complex procedure needing "special review."
Qi Luo smiled.
The smile was exhausted, but real.
"Cen Duo," he said inwardly, "did you see that?"
"The breach-time you bought… didn't end in rollback."
"It ended in this—that rollback will never again be the only option."
——
Outside the Clocktower, the roar of divine war also hit a hitch with the sixth broken sound.
High in the air, the legion chains jolted as if yanked from behind.
The text under the divine envoys' feet refreshed itself in a flurry:
[World Recovery Contingency: downgraded to backup protocol.]
[Task priority update:]
[——Clause "Ensure smooth execution of Recovery" automatically deactivated.]
[——Clauses "Prevent structural collapse" and "Cooperate with New Covenant Council trial-run" rise in priority.]
A divine envoy was just about to slam into the Fallen Knights' line again when the chain under his boots flashed red:
[Warning: current action conflicts with clause "Cooperate with New Covenant Council".]
[Suggestion: switch to "contain localized conflict" to prevent overall collapse.]
He froze.
"What… what is this?"
"Recovery's been downgraded," the older envoy said heavily. "Someone up there… tampered with the backbone."
The winged youth hovered in the air, gasping, watching the god-army formation subtly loosen, his heart dizzy with disbelief.
"We… didn't get wiped?"
On the Fallen Knights' side, someone tilted his head back and laughed, then laughed until tears came. "Cen Duo, you mad bastard… you really bought it."
"D'you see that? Recovery got pushed down."
"Next time the world wants to reset, it has to fight this council first."
——
Mid-level of the Clocktower, within the council ring.
The self-check module projected a line of text before every seat at once:
[Notice: Recovery Contingency has been downgraded to backup and no longer holds automatic authority to override the New Covenant.]
[Error handling shall now follow the new backbone clauses:]
[——Errors shall not be cleared to zero.]
[——Old errors must be kept on record.]
[——Future corrective measures shall be discussed via the New Covenant Council.]
[New Covenant signing progress:]
[Backbone heading and three core principles have been formally written.]
[All remaining clauses remain in trial-run state and must be debated one by one.]
Which meant—what Qi Luo had just completed was only the "top-layer framework."
The details below, compensation, boundaries of authority, the human–divine relationship—those were all still drafts.
But the rollback key, at least for this moment, had been pulled out of the world's default options.
On the mortal seats, some people couldn't help clapping; some collapsed into tears. On the minor-god seats, some glow-balls trembled so hard they almost came apart. The main gods' projections fell silent.
"He really touched the backbone," a god whispered hoarsely.
"The world itself… chose B."
"Chose to remember errors instead of clearing them."
"Chose to have mistakes… written into the New Covenant."
Yuan Heng's projection did not move for a long time.
He looked down at Qi Luo standing in the center of the signing node, completely overdrawn, barely staying upright.
"Key," he said quietly. "Do you know what you've just done?"
Qi Luo lifted his head. His throat was dry enough to hurt. "I've got a rough idea."
"You've made it so that every mistake the world makes from now on has to be written down," Yuan Heng said.
"Written under the heading you just created."
"You turned Recovery into backup, into an awkward method that 'may not erase errors and may only shift the structure around them'."
"You made it impossible for us gods to use the neat little 'button' trick to wash away the stupid things we do."
Qi Luo laughed.
"You make it sound so noble," he said.
"All I did was make you like the little loan shops on Rust Street—"
"—if you owe, you write it down. No more welching."
When he stepped out of the signing node, the light-wall dissolved on its own.
Ruan Ji lunged forward and caught him.
"You still have the strength to joke?" she ground out.
"If I don't laugh now," Qi Luo panted, "later… I might not get the chance."
"We pushed the Recovery Contingency down."
"Next—"
He tilted his head back to look at the ring of spirit-chains, his voice drifting a little.
"——we start balancing the books."
On one corner of the paper, the world wrote a line of tiny text:
[Fallen Knights' breach window: ends here.]
[Automatic start of Recovery Contingency: blocked by new backbone clauses, forcibly rewritten as backup.]
[New Covenant signing progress: entering "filling-in phase".]
[Remaining risks:]
[Carrier Key's name remains deletable.]
[Deletion difficulty: increased, but not impossible.]
In the abyss, the torn-off fragment that once read "all names may be rewritten" gave a low laugh in the dark.
"The end of breach-time," the Shadow said.
"Isn't rollback."
"It's the point where the New Covenant really starts."