The next morning, when Qi Luo got up, his throat was still faintly sore.
Not the scratch from a cold, but the raw ache you'd get if someone had torn him open from the chest all the way up last night and scraped his vocal cords on the way.
The Forbidden Sigil in the center of his breastbone had stopped burning. What it left behind was a dull, swollen emptiness, as if something that was supposed to be embedded there had been yanked out for a moment, then shoved back in, rough and wrong.
He still looked more or less normal in the mirror—face a bit pale, bluish shadows under his eyes—but at Star-Signet Academy that just made him one more student who'd pulled an all-nighter over a stack of books.
"You look like hell," his roommate said, buttoning his uniform as he eyed Qi Luo. "Dream the gods came to audit your taxes or something?"
"I dreamed you slept without snoring." Qi Luo straightened his collar. "Scarier than any god."
They bickered their way toward class. Morning bell had just finished ringing; the lights in the teaching buildings were flicking on one after another. Above their heads, the classroom clause-chains slowly came into focus in the light, like an invisible ceiling pressing down over everyone.
First period hadn't started yet. Qi Luo had just settled into his seat when the homeroom teacher pushed the door open.
His surname was Han. He looked harmless, voice not loud, but everything he did was strictly by the book. He took attendance first, tossed out a few reminders about homework, then finally lifted his head and swept his gaze around the room.
"Qi Luo, you here?"
Dozens of eyes swung toward the back rows with him.
"Here." Qi Luo raised his hand.
"The Academy Safety and Guidance Office wants you," Teacher Han said with a squinting smile. "Routine 'Basic Covenant Recitation Feedback' survey. There were one or two bits of data in your ceremony record yesterday that weren't too clear. They want to re-record."
A chill slid down Qi Luo's back. "…Not too clear?"
"Don't get nervous." Han's smile didn't fade. "Just a technical thing. When there are a lot of people, the chain recordings can interfere with each other. Kids from Rust Street hear the words 'Safety Office' and immediately think someone's here to drag you off for conscription."
A thin wave of laughter rippled through the room.
"Third Building, Safety Office," Teacher Han added. "Head over now, you'll be back before noon. Don't skip afternoon classes."
Qi Luo stood. "Yes, sir."
The moment he stepped out and the door closed behind him, he finally slowed his pace.
—Yesterday's Basic Covenant confirmation, the monitoring chains had clearly reported "no anomalous fluctuations."
But the people in the Safety Office obviously weren't prepared to just take that at face value.
Building Three sat on the edge of the teaching district; outside was the Academy wall. Compared to the bright main buildings, this block of stone looked a little gloomy. The walls were damp all year, with some unidentifiable moss creeping in the corners.
Qi Luo walked up to the door marked "Star-Signet Academy Safety Counseling and Covenant Maintenance," drew a deep breath, and knocked.
"Come in."
The voice wasn't loud; it sounded younger than he'd expected.
Qi Luo pushed the door open.
The office wasn't big. The window was open just a crack; light slanted in from the side and split the room into bright and dim halves. By the window, several rows of cabinets were crammed full of file scrolls and glass jars labeled "monitoring-chain backup." On the side closer to the door there was only one desk and one chair.
Someone sat in that chair.
Not a middle-aged man like Teacher Han, but a woman in her twenties, wearing the gray-blue long coat of the Academy Safety Office. Under it you could just make out the lines of a silver-gray hunter's coat. Her hair was tied up high, fixed with a silver chain-clasp. Her eyes were very dark, like two calm, nailed-down points.
The moment Qi Luo stepped in, he saw a thin black chain drawing back into the inside of her sleeve, slowly coiling down—as if it had just been recalled from a mission outside.
"Student Qi Luo?" She looked up, her gaze falling on his face.
"Yes." Qi Luo stopped at the doorway. "My teacher told me to come. Said there was… an issue with my Basic Covenant recitation record."
"Sit." She gestured at the chair in front of the desk, tone neither warm nor cold. "My surname is Ruan. I'm a 'security consultant' hired by the Academy. Some kids from the lower levels hear that title and get nervous. You can think of me as… the one responsible for fishing you out when you get in trouble."
Qi Luo didn't move.
He knew that name.
Ruan Ji.
On that black Chain of the Covenant Hunters' task list, the "contact" column for his entry had read: [Contact: Ruan Ji].
"Thank you." He still sat down, spine straighter than it ever was in class.
Ruan Ji flicked him a glance and made a small note to herself—kid from Rust Street, good sense for danger.
"Relax." She put away the thin slate in her hand. "You remember yesterday's Basic Covenant confirmation ceremony, right?"
"I remember," Qi Luo said.
"After the ceremony, we did a routine spot check of the recordings." Ruan Ji's tone was light. "Most people's chains were very well-behaved, obediently accepting their share of the light. Yours…" She paused. "Was a little blurry."
The faint ache in Qi Luo's throat was tugged awake. The tension he'd forced down floated back up. "Blurry where?"
"In the 'obedience' segment." Ruan Ji stared at him. "From what the monitoring chains recorded, when that stream of light tried to connect to the mainline, something blocked it. Like mist blowing it off course. The system ended up classifying it as 'temporary masking,' so it didn't auto-report."
Qi Luo's head buzzed.
—Temporary screening.
The phrase he'd vaguely heard in the middle of last night's pain.
"Maybe it's just the environment in Rust Street," he said, keeping his tone as offhand as he could. "We get a lot of fog down there. Even the chains go damp."
Ruan Ji looked at him, the corner of her mouth tilting.
"You're pretty good at cracking jokes." She set a tiny observation lens over her left eye; the sigils etched around its rim lit up one by one. "I've got permission to pull more detailed data than the system shows on its own. I can see a little more than it can…"
What she saw was completely different from Qi Luo's view.
In her lens, his Basic Covenant chain extended from his chest toward the mainline like every other student's. But at the contact point, a thin shadow was flickering—not the normal overlap of Covenant Chains, but… a cover.
Outside the cover, the刻痕 of the World-Scale Covenant Chain were perfectly clear. Inside, she couldn't read a single character.
It was as if that segment had been given a "reading mask."
"Do you know what that means?" Ruan Ji removed the lens and asked.
Qi Luo shook his head. "I'm just an ordinary exam kid from Rust Street."
"'Ordinary.'" Ruan Ji repeated. "Ordinary kids don't have their Basic Covenant chain masked. Those are world-scale clauses. Other than the few monsters sitting at the very top of the Covenant Council, who could even touch them?"
She said it casually, like small talk. But Qi Luo knew, nobody used the word "monsters" in normal theology lectures.
That was a term only Covenant Hunters used among themselves.
"You don't have to rush to explain." Ruan Ji suddenly shifted tone and smiled. "Since the system tagged you as 'no anomalous fluctuations,' we'll treat it as 'technical masking' for now. Calling you in today is just procedure—to confirm you didn't deliberately do anything… dangerous."
"What kind of thing counts as 'dangerous'?" Qi Luo asked.
"For example, trying to feel around your own basic clauses," Ruan Ji said offhandedly. "Or poking around randomly on a World-Scale Covenant Chain."
A jolt went through Qi Luo. The hairs on his back almost stood on end, but his face didn't change. "I wouldn't dare."
"Really?" Ruan Ji tilted her head. "You dared to make Professor Zhuang Kelan's self-binding clause bite him in front of the whole class. I thought you might dare just about anything."
Qi Luo froze for a second. "The professor told you about that?"
"Professor Zhuang's report was very tactful," Ruan Ji said. "He only mentioned 'a student whose sensitivity to supplemental clauses in class was above the norm.'"
She tapped the table lightly. "So yes, I'm curious about you."
"I learned in Rust Street," Qi Luo said. "Plenty of IOUs there. Plenty of traps."
"Who taught you?" Ruan Ji pressed. "Anyone in the family in the covenant business?"
"I don't have a family." Qi Luo's response was completely natural. "Just an old junk man who sometimes helps people look over their IOUs. All he does is curse people out, he doesn't 'teach' much of anything."
That was half true, half false.
Garth would never admit he was "teaching" him. He only knocked Qi Luo on the head when the boy sprawled over a table reading clauses, cursing things like "this is idiotic" or "that's way too obvious."
Ruan Ji looked at him quietly for a long time.
She didn't rush to expose him, or to believe him.
"According to regulations," she said at last, "students like you whose Basic Covenant recitation shows 'technical masking' have to sign a 'Star-Signet Academy Safety Conduct and Covenant Monitoring Consent.'"
She pulled out a scroll from the drawer and unrolled it.
There weren't many words written—just a standard Academy internal covenant:
[Clause 1: I pledge to abide by all rules and regulations of Star-Signet Academy, and will not actively touch, alter, or attempt to interpret any high-level clauses outside my own Basic Covenant.]
[Clause 2: I consent to the Academy's Safety Counseling Department accessing monitoring-chain records related to me when necessary for risk assessment; all such content is for internal use only.]
[Clause 3: If I discover any abnormal fluctuation in my own Covenant Chains, I have the obligation to report it proactively and cooperate with investigation.]
Below were blank spaces for name and date.
"Very simple," Ruan Ji said. "Most students with 'chain interference records' sign something like this. There's no downside for you. It just means if similar masking shows up again, it'll be easier for us to access the logs."
Qi Luo didn't reach out right away.
He looked at the scroll from a distance.
To him, it wasn't three simple promises, but a "half-finished chain" freshly copied out from somewhere. Every line of text had a corresponding thin line rising into the air, hanging between him and Ruan Ji, not yet attached to either name.
The line for Clause 1 was neat, hooked into the bundle of Academy regulations. Clause 3 looked normal too, tied into the cluster of "self-reporting anomaly obligations."
The real problem was Clause 2.
The chain connected to that one was abnormally thick, its color cold. At its end, it fused into another, even colder chain—that one represented Hunter Monitoring Authorization.
Qi Luo could clearly see the little hooks on that authorization chain. Once they latched onto his name, all it would take was a tug from Ruan Ji's side to look directly at the fluctuations in his Covenant Chains, without any Academy procedure in the way.
Worse—deeper in the chain, a very small "trigger sigil" was lodged there:
[If, during the signing or execution of this clause, the subject under investigation attempts to alter the clause content without authorization, this shall automatically be deemed "deliberate evasion of monitoring" and reported to the Council.]
That was where the snare's real teeth lay.
It wasn't about whether he agreed to sign—it was about whether he dared to lay a finger on it.
"Don't be nervous." Seeing how long he'd gone silent, Ruan Ji's tone slid softer. "You can read it through before you sign. I won't rush you."
Qi Luo raised his hand and took the scroll.
The moment his fingertips brushed the paper, a chill crept up along the lines, probing at his palm prints—that was the preparatory action for recording his "willingness to sign."
"Can I ask a question?" Qi Luo lowered his head, putting on a serious-reading face. "For example, this 'necessary' in 'access monitoring chains when necessary'—who decides what's 'necessary'?"
"The Academy Safety Office," Ruan Ji answered without hesitation. "Specifically, security consultants like me."
"Then can I request—" Qi Luo looked up. "That every access be logged?"
Ruan Ji arched an eyebrow. "Of course it's logged. The internal system records everything. What are you worried about? That every time I look at your chains you'll lose a piece of flesh?"
"I'm worried I'll only hear from someone else that my chains have a problem after they've already been looked at," Qi Luo said.
That line was a little too true.
Ruan Ji stared at him for three seconds, then suddenly smiled. "Understandable. So you want the wording spelled out more clearly?"
"If possible." Qi Luo nodded. "Something like—'each time monitoring-chain records are accessed, a log is simultaneously left on my own Covenant Chains.'"
"You even know the term 'log'?" Ruan Ji said aloud.
That word usually only appeared in internal Covenant Council documents.
Qi Luo's heart skipped.
"Black-market IOUs use it too," he said through gritted teeth. "Stuff like: 'any time the ledger is accessed, a note must be made on the page,' so no one can skim off the top."
"Mm." Ruan Ji made a noncommittal sound.
She tapped her fingers on the desk, seriously weighing it. In truth, this kind of "add a log" request wasn't against the rules. It could even be seen as a form of self-protection and a check on the power to monitor. Some Academy instructors had signed similar covenants themselves, requiring that any access to their teaching records leave traces.
"All right," Ruan Ji said. "You can add a line after Clause 2: 'each time monitoring records are accessed, an access marker will be appended to my own Covenant Chains.'"
As she spoke, her fingers twitched.
In Qi Luo's eyes, a small branch immediately sprouted from the tail of that cold authorization chain and hooked into the bundle of "access marker" chains, making the clause look a little gentler—at least on paper, things looked more balanced.
But he knew that wasn't the part she really cared about.
The real snare was still that little [unauthorized alteration reports upward] buried deeper.
"Happy now?" Ruan Ji asked.
"More or less." Qi Luo lowered his head, rolling the scroll in his hands, looking like he was fussing over phrasing, while in fact he was matching the structure of the chains in the air line by line.
The trigger sigil was embedded midway along the authorization chain like a brand-new nail. Once his name was attached, any non-"standard path" modification would be judged by the system as his "active tampering."
—Which meant if he did move, he'd be admitting he had the ability to move it.
This was the Covenant Hunter's probe.
If he didn't sign, he looked guilty. If he did, who knew when they might use this chain to follow it back to him.
He couldn't refuse.
A little fixer from Rust Street could hide in the shadows and bargain with minor gods; a student of Star-Signet Academy couldn't dodge the Safety Office's paperwork.
That left only one option—dig a hole in the spot they thought was sealed tight.
Qi Luo looked up with a slightly strained smile. "Then I'll sign."
Ruan Ji leaned back a little, giving him space on the desk. "Go ahead."
She didn't put the observation lens back on, but the black chain inside her sleeve quietly extended, a wisp of smoke hovering just above Qi Luo's wrist.
Covenant Hunters had their own way of "seeing." They didn't need a lens to sense a clause shifting.
Qi Luo dipped the quill in ink.
The surface of the paper flashed faintly in front of him—that was the signal the covenant was ready to accept a name.
He held his breath and set the tip of the pen on the "Name" line.
Qi Luo.
As soon as the two characters were written, one end of the authorization chain lashed out a thin line, reaching toward his chest. The little [unauthorized alteration reports upward] sigil warmed as well, like a hound that had caught a scent.
—Now.
Qi Luo said silently to himself.
The instant the pen left his name, he didn't pull it back. In the same motion, he slid down to Clause 2 and, after that newly added "access marker" line, wrote a short extra phrase.
On the page, it only made the sentence a bit longer—just a few inconspicuous words:
[…and a record of this access shall be simultaneously logged on the accessing party's Covenant Chains as responsibility for this access.]
Eight key characters' worth of meaning: "accessing party's Covenant Chains," "responsibility."
To ordinary readers, it was just "stricter logging," the kind of fussy wording some students liked to add.
But in Qi Luo's eyes, when that extra phrase fell into place, the structure of the chain shifted by a hair.
The "access marker" branch that had originally only been hooked onto his side suddenly split in the middle, sending a thinner thread toward the other direction—to the executor's name.
In other words, from now on, any access to his monitoring records would leave a mark not only on his own Covenant Chains, but also on the Covenant Chains of whoever operated the access, with a little "responsibility note" attached.
And because "accessing party's Covenant Chains" was now written into the same clause, once the covenant was judged to have undergone any "non-standard modification," the target of that [unauthorized alteration] sigil was no longer just "the monitored party," but "both parties to the clause."
—The person trying to tamper with the clause would no longer automatically be "the one being monitored." It might just as well be "the investigator."
The trap no longer tightened in only one direction; it had become a small lock looped around both their throats.
Whoever yanked first would feel it bite first.
Qi Luo's motion as he wrote those extra words was as fast as humanly possible, almost stitched to his signature. If you hadn't been watching from the very beginning, it was hard to even see he'd added something.
He set the pen down and looked up.
Ruan Ji had been watching him the whole time.
Of course she'd noticed that tiny delay—in her hunter's instinct, there'd been a tremor around him, just half a beat longer than with other students, when he wrote his name.
"That extra line…" She pointed at the scroll. "You came up with that just now?"
"I only meant to 'write it more precisely,'" Qi Luo said. "Is it against the rules?"
Her gaze lingered on his face for a second, then slid away.
"Doesn't quite count as against the rules," she said. "It's just not the kind of thing an average student would think of."
She reached out and rolled the scroll up.
In her view, the authorization chain she'd originally designed had now snapped onto Qi Luo's name; at the same time, a tiny new thread had hooked back along her own, that was the "accessor responsibility record."
She didn't reach for that [unauthorized alteration reports upward] sigil right away.
Hunter's habits told her that if she touched it now, all she'd do was show she was "paying attention" to this tiny new branch.
"All right," she said calmly. "Confirmation complete. From today on, if your Covenant Chains show any anomalous vibrations, we have the right to inspect them. Correspondingly, every inspection will leave traces on our side as well."
Qi Luo nodded. "Makes it a bit fairer."
"You care a lot about 'fairness,'" Ruan Ji said with a half-smile. "Rust Street taught you that?"
"Rust Street taught me nothing comes free," Qi Luo said, rising. "Anything else you want to ask me, Teacher?"
"Not for the moment." Ruan Ji waved him off. "You can go back to class."
Qi Luo turned toward the door.
His hand had just closed around the doorknob when Ruan Ji suddenly spoke.
"Qi Luo."
He stopped and turned his head. "Teacher?"
"If anyone taught you to pull little tricks like that inside a clause," Ruan Ji said very softly, "remember to tell them this for me—this time, they reached a little too high."
A hard jolt hit Qi Luo's chest.
"No one taught me." His expression didn't crack. "I just… tend to think crooked when I look at clauses."
Ruan Ji stared at his back, speaking each word clearly. "Next time, don't think that crooked in front of me."
Qi Luo murmured his assent and pushed the door open.
It wasn't until the door closed behind him that he realized his back was soaked with sweat.
The office went quiet again.
Outside, the wind brushed past, flicking up the corner of the curtain.
Ruan Ji set the rolled-up scroll on the desk instead of filing it away, and put her observation lens back on.
In the world framed by the lens, the structure of the clause showed even more clearly than before.
By her original design, once the authorization chain linked to Qi Luo's name it should have extended downward into a "monitored party" node and upward into the Hunter Monitoring Mainline.
Now, there was an extra bit.
A small branch had split off from the "access marker" segment and then forked into two: one end hooked onto Qi Luo's side, and the other… quietly wound back along her own name onto her own Covenant Chains.
[accessing party's Covenant Chains]
[access responsibility]
Eight tiny characters' worth of meaning, like eight hair-thin nails, had fastened what she'd meant to be a chain tightening in one direction firmly onto herself as well.
Ruan Ji narrowed her eyes.
"That wasn't something he just scribbled," she murmured.
Crude covenant edits always left burrs—the chain would warp in obvious ways, distances between nodes would look wrong, higher-order clauses might even kick back.
This little branch… was too clean.
He'd inserted it at a textbook-perfect spot, in the "supplementary annotation zone" that the authorization chain allowed to be extended, and had managed to step just around the trigger area of that [unauthorized alteration reports upward] sigil, changing its "applicable target" from a single "monitored party" to "both parties to the clause."
In other words—
If someday in the future she wanted to quietly tweak this authorization chain, say by deleting the phrase "access responsibility," the system's sense of "unauthorized alteration" might very well land on her.
"Professional level," Ruan Ji breathed.
She drew out her own black chain and flicked it upward.
The tip unfolded into a tiny recording loop.
In it, she wrote:
[Target: Qi Luo]
[New finding: When signing the monitoring authorization covenant, he inserted the short phrase 'access responsibility' within the permitted range, changing the structure from one-way control to a mutual lock.]
She paused, then added:
[Assessment: Possesses high-precision recognition of covenant structures; choice of insertion point is professional, style similar to that of already-documented 'underground covenant firms.']
"Similar to who, I wonder…" she muttered. "That bunch in Rust Street?"
She thought of an internal report she'd skimmed not long ago.
It mentioned a group of Fallen Knights' remnants in the lower districts, working with certain heretic gods to open "covenant firms" in Rust Street, specializing in rewriting clauses for weaker divinities and bottom-tier mortals—though in the Covenant Council's official language, that was "illegal tampering with Covenant Chains."
Several chain diagrams attached to that report had edits in them… subtly similar to the positions Qi Luo had just chosen.
Not identical, but with an inherited "hand-feel" to them.
"Who's behind you, Qi Luo?" Ruan Ji looked at that newly-grown branch, tapping the tabletop with a finger. "That legendary 'underground firm'? Or some other shadow I haven't seen yet?"
The recording loop on the black chain slowly constricted into a new node and hung itself beside the line with Qi Luo's name.
[Suggested risk level: Yellow → Orange (pending approval).]
[Do not attempt capture for now. Extend observation period. Priority: track possible mentors/factions he may contact.]
She didn't immediately send "Orange" up the chain; she just saved this line as a "draft."
Her hunter's instincts told her this kid… shouldn't be "dealt with" too early.
First, that layer of unreadable black mist wrapped around him meant anyone who tried to lay a hand on him would have to think twice about how the World-Scale Covenant Chain might react. Second—his way of inserting a pin into the Chain was interesting.
"You're not just a simple key," Ruan Ji murmured. "You're more like a tool that hasn't been fully written yet."
Outside, the clouds pressed lower, the shadow of the distant clocktower looming in and out of view.
She put away the observation lens, turned off the small lamp on the desk, and stepped out of the office.
At the end of the corridor, the door to the campus stood half-open. Students' laughter drifted over from afar, mixing with the metallic clang of the workshop district and the smell of mist rising from the lower levels.
Ruan Ji lifted her head, looking up into the sky.
In the hazy light, she seemed to see a massive chain stretched quietly across the very top of the city.
One of its nodes gave the faintest tremor.
The movement was so small it was almost imperceptible, but for someone who watched Covenant Chains all day, such details could not be missed.
"People upstairs are combing through your file now too, I bet," she said to the empty air.
No answer—only the distant shadow of the clocktower, unmoved.
Meanwhile, in the boys' dorm on the other side of campus, Qi Luo was hunched over his desk, staring blankly at a copied booklet of the Academy Conduct Code.
The words on the page were packed tight, all about "no fighting," "no staying out overnight without permission," "no disrupting the order of class"—useless noise.
The one rule that actually mattered would never show up in any public text:
——[Don't pull tricks we can't understand in any place we can see.]
Qi Luo closed the booklet softly.
Deep, deep in his chest, the Forbidden Sigil gave a cold little thump.
As if to remind him—he hadn't just dodged a snare.
On another, unseen great chain, he'd just tied a new tiny knot.
One end of that knot was on him.
The other end was tied into the Covenant Chains of a Hunter named Ruan Ji.