By the time Qi Luo got back to Rust Street, the sky was fully dark.
The mouth of the old pipe shaft looked the same as ever—a rusted ladder, damp streaks on the wall, and a god's face someone had once spray-painted there, long since smeared by kids with soot into a twisted ghost.
He climbed down the ladder. The Forbidden Sigil on his chest pulsed with waves of heat.
Not a warning—more like a "connection reminder."
—Someone on the other end of the interlayer was still hanging on.
The lamps inside the Nameless Firm were already lit.
Luo Xiu was slumped over the table, asleep, half a flatbread still hanging out of his mouth. Sangya sat by the circle array, slowly whittling at a piece of wood with a knife. Garth leaned against the wall, pretending to rest his eyes, but his ears were pricked, listening for anything unusual in the tower chimes above.
Qi Luo lifted the canvas curtain and stepped in. All three of them looked up at once.
"Still here?" Garth asked. He wasn't asking about "Qi Luo," but about the Chains hanging off him.
"Yeah." Qi Luo nodded. "The world hasn't marked me as 'connection lost' yet."
He didn't explain further. He tossed his satchel onto the table and dragged a chair out.
From anyone else's point of view, he simply drew in a deep breath and traced a slow circle through the air.
In the Chain-world, that circle cut open a slit—starting from the carved words on the Firm's wall and extending outward until it touched that correction-fluid patch of blankness.
"...Come in," Qi Luo said in his head.
On the other side of the interlayer, Ruan Ji opened her eyes.
The weightless feeling had eased a little, but it still felt like standing on thin ice that could give way at any moment—every step she took got no feedback from any clause; the World Base-Covenant's monitoring modules slid past her as if no one had ever been there.
She followed the line.
On the far end of it was a faint yellow glow.
Like a cheap oil lamp.
The next instant, her field of view dropped.
The old pipe walls, the circle array, the metal table, the crooked "Nameless Firm" carved on the wall—all floated faintly into view, everything faintly transparent, like she was standing behind a pane of glass looking at the scene.
"This is—" she whispered.
"My hole," Qi Luo said.
He looked up, sight skimming over the tabletop, and nodded toward a spot no one else could see.
"Welcome to your first visit as a 'non-system entity,'" he drawled. "Hunter-lady."
Luo Xiu yawned. "You're talking to the air again?"
"You'll get used to it," Sangya muttered. The corner of her eye still swept the room—she knew this Firm sometimes had "invisible clients."
Garth said nothing. His fingers tapped the wall twice, like a silent greeting.
Ruan Ji saw it all, a strange feeling in her chest.
—For the first time, she was standing in a place not as a "Hunter" being seen.
Not as an ID given by Chains, not as a mark in a monitoring stone, but as someone a bunch of Rust Street nobodies had, in their own clumsy way, quietly left a "spot" for.
"Come over here."
Qi Luo reached out and patted the air beside the table.
From the outside, it looked like he was calling over an invisible cat.
Ruan Ji instinctively wanted to roll her eyes. But she still followed the line and "sat" across from him.
From her side, she was actually standing, only the height of her view matched the tabletop—there were no chairs in the interlayer and no real gravity. She just adjusted herself into a "sitting" posture out of habit.
"How do you feel?" Qi Luo asked.
"Like the world tossed me into its trash-recycling bin and hasn't decided whether to delete me or pull me back out," Ruan Ji said coolly.
She lowered her gaze to the table.
Documents were spread out—Lihen's function transfer, the Human Clause Appendix, a few draft covenants for renegotiating with gods.
The writing was tiny, packed tight.
Qi Luo followed her gaze and smiled.
"Relax," he said. "If the world really wanted to treat you as garbage, that cut wouldn't have stopped at 'test-run.'"
"It's hesitating." He tapped the table. "Which gives you an opening."
"An opening?" Ruan Ji looked up. "An opening to help you finish a few jobs before I get erased?"
"An opening to rewrite your own Hunter covenant," Qi Luo said, expression turning serious.
The room went quiet.
Garth and the others had enough sense not to butt in. They each pretended to stay busy—given how Qi Luo looked when he drifted like this, it was best not to interrupt.
Ruan Ji stared at him.
"Do you even know what a Hunter's covenant is?" she asked.
"I can guess a little." Qi Luo said.
He raised a hand, fingertip touching the air—not randomly, but tracing along where Ruan Ji's Hunter system Chains used to be, feeling for deeper layers.
The name-register interlayer had knocked Ruan Ji out of the "system layer." At the same time, her basic covenants had lost their upper-layer shielding and were partially exposed at the edges.
To most people, that was empty space they couldn't touch.
To someone holding the key-mark, it was a keyhole with a gap to quietly slip a key into.
Qi Luo turned the key.
The Forbidden Sigil on his chest flared with sudden heat.
The World Base-Covenant clearly disliked that move; somewhere far off, a low warning rumbled:
[Attention: rollback stripe should not frequently contact personal base-covenants.]
Qi Luo clenched his teeth and filed the warning under "background noise."
He followed Ruan Ji's personal covenant chain down.
On the topmost layer were the things every mortal had:
[Birth Registration]
[Basic Covenant · Obedience, Taxation, Confession]
[Academic Records]
Below that was the layer where the Hunter system had plugged itself in.
That chunk was cruder, clearly patched on:
[Hunter Covenant: voluntarily devote oneself to the divine authority system as a "blade," carrying out the duty of eliminating illegal covenant-users and abnormalities.]
[Core Clause One: absolute obedience to the Covenant Council's directives.]
[Core Clause Two: during mission execution, personal emotions may not be treated as interfering factors.]
[Core Clause Three: upon detecting self-tendency to "deviate from duty," subject may be reclaimed or replaced by the system at any time.]
Those were still "normal," relatively speaking.
Qi Luo pushed deeper.
One layer down, the font suddenly shifted to something older.
[God's Blade Selection · Old Covenant Remnant]
[From a certain year forward, promising offspring shall be selected among mortals; through training and baptism they shall become "extensions of divine will."]
[Upon completion of the Hunter covenant, their "self-will" shall be partially locked, leaving only judgement ability and execution efficiency; no longer to act for themselves.]
[Note: to ensure the blade's sharpness, concepts such as personal happiness, desire, and belonging may be weakened at the clause level as "irrelevant variables."]
Qi Luo's fingers tightened when he got there.
"...They really went that far," he muttered.
Ruan Ji could hear him.
She'd originally meant to shoot back a sarcastic "What, you thought Hunters were a jury?" but the words stuck.
This was how she'd been raised.
From the day she'd been picked for the preparatory camp, the theology mentors had hammered the same things into her head again and again:
—You are not a person. You are a blade.
—The gods hold you; they cut where they like.
—You don't need to ask why—only was the cut deep enough?
She'd thought she'd gotten used to it.
Used to treating "self" as a joke.
But when those words appeared as covenants, read aloud one by one by someone else, that familiar structure suddenly turned into a naked humiliation.
"Turns out you really were written as a tool," Qi Luo said after finishing that part. He looked up at her, something complicated in his eyes.
Ruan Ji's face didn't change, but it felt like a needle in her chest.
"This your idea of how to talk to a girl?" she asked, voice cold.
"Sorry," Qi Luo retracted instantly. "Let me put it academically—'you're an execution interface with deliberately reduced autonomy.'"
"That sounds worse," Ruan Ji said.
She knew he wasn't trying to insult her.
He was simply describing what he saw.
But having someone else peel you apart clause by clause and read out "you don't count as a person in the text" still left her throat dry.
She stared at her Hunter covenant.
This wasn't her first time seeing those words.
Every time she was promoted to a higher Hunter grade, she'd had to click "confirm" in the system—confirm willingness to take on more dangerous tasks, to give up more personal time, feelings, choices.
She'd never thought it was wrong.
Until now.
Only now did she realize—
Buried at the bottom had always been this ancient "God's Blade Covenant," hung there before she was old enough to understand.
And what it really meant was:
From the very beginning, she hadn't been allowed to be a whole person.
"You asked when I got the Name-Erasure order," Ruan Ji said quietly. "Now you know."
Qi Luo was silent for a moment.
"God's Blade," he said slowly. "From their perspective, you're much more dangerous than me."
"I'm just a key scribbling in their margins," he gave a crooked smile. "You're the one holding their handle."
He tapped a spot on her Hunter covenant:
[If the blade rusts, dulls, or develops self-doubt, it may be reclaimed and melted down at any time to avoid harming the divine hand.]
"You know how long that line's been here?" Qi Luo asked.
"Older than me." Ruan Ji said.
"So when the Council handed you the Name-Erasure order, they didn't bother writing 'compensation' anywhere," Qi Luo said. "In this logic, you were always just one knife in the rack."
"A knife rusts, you toss it."
Ruan Ji's mouth twitched like she wanted to laugh and couldn't.
"First day as a Hunter, I knew that much," she said. "You're just reading it out loud for me now."
"Before, you 'knew' it," Qi Luo said. "Today, you see it."
He meant—see it at the clause level.
Not as a mentor's lecture. Not as a system prompt. But standing outside herself and reading those lines with her own eyes.
It felt like looking in a mirror.
The face in the reflection had "blade" carved across it.
"So what exactly are you planning?" Ruan Ji asked. "White out a few lines?"
"I can alter part of the Hunter covenant layer," Qi Luo said. "That God's Blade older layer… touch it the wrong way and we'll have half a dozen ancient gods poking their heads in to listen."
"But right now you're in the interlayer." He tapped the tabletop. "Their ears can't hear us clearly here."
"You're saying while the system thinks I'm 'corrupted data,' you'll sneak something in?" Ruan Ji raised a brow.
"You can think of it as—while you've fallen off the rack, take a minute to carve two characters into the spine," Qi Luo said.
"And those two characters say?"
Qi Luo didn't answer at once.
He unrolled a small "draft sheet" over a blank patch on her Hunter covenant.
It was his own scrap-assembled clause board—old covenant remnants patched together and hung near the key-mark, so the World Base-Covenant couldn't immediately decide if it was a test surface or trash.
"Rewriting the Hunter's Covenant," he read the title he scribbled. "We'll need a few core points first."
"First question…" he looked up at her. "Do you still want to be a Hunter?"
Ruan Ji froze.
Simple question. Hard answer.
"If I say no," she said slowly, "can you turn me into… a Rust Street flatbread seller?"
"Nope," Qi Luo said honestly. "There are too many Hunter structures hanging off you. Shaving them all off in one cut would shave you off with them."
"And if I say yes?" she asked.
"Then we change what 'Hunter' means," Qi Luo said.
He wrote on the draft board:
[Hunter: no longer merely a blade of divine will, but an executor of covenants. Their duty is to apply all clauses impartially, not using 'god vs mortal' as the sole line of division.]
"That sounds… more dangerous," Ruan Ji frowned.
"Yeah," Qi Luo nodded. "From a god's perspective."
"From yours—" he met her eyes, "it's the first time the clauses recognize you as a 'judge.'"
"And not just a tool."
Ruan Ji stared at the line.
Every phrase was a thorn—"no longer merely," "apply impartially," "not using 'god vs mortal' as sole division."
Every phrase reached for the divine power structure.
"You know what you're writing?" she asked.
"I'm writing your job description," Qi Luo said. "And slipping in some things they'd rather never see."
He started a second clause:
[Hunter · Personal Clause One: retains full personal judgement rights. Faced with orders that clearly violate the World Base-Covenant's bottom line (such as indiscriminate incineration reset, causeless Name-Erasure, etc.), Hunter has the right to refuse and lodge challenge against the order at a higher clause level.]
"Refuse an order," Ruan Ji echoed.
"I'll hang this one under the World Base-Covenant's 'self-check' section," Qi Luo said. "You're not rebelling out of nowhere—you're doing a systems audit."
For the third, he slowed down even more:
[Hunter · Personal Clause Two: concepts such as 'personal happiness, desire, and belonging' may not be treated as irrelevant variables. The system may no longer weaken them wholesale under the pretext of 'keeping the blade sharp.']
"This one reads a little sappy," Qi Luo muttered at himself.
"They're the ones who wrote 'weaken personal happiness,'" Ruan Ji said coolly. "What word are you using to throw it back?"
Qi Luo thought for a bit, then toned down the three words "happiness, desire, belonging," adding a note beside them:
[Note: while these variables do not directly enter core adjudication, they affect the Hunter's long-term stability and thus must be preserved.]
"This way the World Base-Covenant is more likely to listen," he explained. "It likes 'stability.'"
Ruan Ji watched him write.
She didn't actually care that much about the wording.
For someone raised as a "blade," "happiness, desire, belonging" were far more distant than "completion rate, execution efficiency, mission count."
What she was really watching for was what Qi Luo would shove into the deepest part.
"You're circling around it," she said suddenly. "You're aiming for that one."
"Which one?" Qi Luo pretended not to know.
"The one you didn't finish in the Catastrophe clauses," Ruan Ji said. "You want to jam 'basic human rights first' into the Hunter system."
Qi Luo paused, then admitted it.
"You read me pretty well."
"I am a Hunter," she said, corner of her mouth lifting.
She drew a long breath.
"Then write it," she said. "Put it somewhere hardest to see and most useful to use."
"Before I write it…" Qi Luo looked at her. "We have to be clear on one thing."
"What?"
"If one day, really, a god's order and mortal lives collide in front of you… which side do you choose?" Qi Luo asked slowly.
This time, Ruan Ji didn't shoot back right away.
Her Hunter instincts told her: choose the order. You are a blade.
Some other part of her—the part still belonging to "person"—had wavered for the first time on Plague Night, watching kids on the lower levels cough themselves half-dead.
She remembered that night on the wind-tower, watching Qi Luo drag plague away from bodies and into the tower and old machines. She'd had the authority to slap "in custody" on him right there and hadn't.
She remembered the temple square, the Catastrophe proxy being forced to sign the Human Clause Appendix in front of her. She could've called out exactly which test-section logic he'd leveraged and hadn't.
"...I don't know," she said honestly.
"Good," Qi Luo said. "Then I'm not going to write that you 'must' choose a side."
"So what are you writing?"
On the draft board, Qi Luo slowly penned a line of very small text:
[Hunter · Hidden Priority: when clauses of divine authority directly conflict with mortals' basic rights, the system, under the premise of not shaking the world's structural foundation, should preferentially evaluate solutions that 'preserve humanity's baseline survival and dignity.']
[If executor actively chooses such a solution, the World Base-Covenant may not treat this choice alone as sufficient grounds for punishment on the basis of 'dereliction of duty.']
[Note: definition of basic human rights as per "Skycast City Epidemic Shelter and Reconstruction Covenant · Human Clause Appendix."]
These lines were nearly transparent.
Even Qi Luo had to lean in to read them clearly.
"You're not writing this for me," Ruan Ji said.
"For the system," Qi Luo nodded. "And for any Hunter who might inherit this in the future."
"This one won't get highlighted. It won't be read aloud at any grand clause recitation," he said. "It'll be treated as an 'execution suggestion' tucked into the priority logic."
"When you—or some other Hunter—find yourselves hesitating between an order and a crowd of people, the system will nudge this line at you."
"Tell you: choosing mortals isn't illegal."
"At worst, it's 'risky,'" he added.
Ruan Ji's heart thumped a little faster.
"You realize what that means?" she murmured.
"I do," Qi Luo said.
"You want the Hunter system to be the bar in the middle between gods and mortals," she said. "Not just helping one side."
"It's not what I want," Qi Luo said. "It's what the world should've written from the start."
"It got lazy. I'm helping it fix a line."
He looked at her.
"Are you willing to carry that line?" he asked.
Ruan Ji was quiet for a long time.
Wind gusted through the interlayer, bringing echoes of those huge covenants buried deep in the World Base-Covenant.
Words as big as mountains:
[Obedience]
[Order]
[Clearing]
She'd believed those words so deeply she'd been ready to die for them.
Now, next to those giant characters, there were a few new strokes, so tiny they were almost invisible—like someone had taken a knife to the edge of a divine stele and scratched in a line of their own.
"...You're using my Hunter covenant as the handle," Ruan Ji said. "To carve that in."
"You can say no," Qi Luo said.
"And if I do?"
"You go back to the Hunter rolls," Qi Luo said. "You keep being their blade, the 'throw into the furnace anytime' kind."
"Or you hover in the interlayer until the system decides you're taking up space and wipes you like a corrupted log."
Ruan Ji lowered her eyes to her Hunter covenant.
It still said, cold and clear:
[Upon detecting self-tendency to "deviate from duty," subject may be reclaimed by the system at any time.]
"'Deviate from duty,'" she murmured. "When did they start thinking I had deviation tendencies?"
"From the night you let Qi Luo go," Qi Luo answered for her.
"From the moment you didn't stop the Human Clause Appendix on the temple square."
"From the wrinkle between your brows the second you got the Name-Erasure order."
"The system is sensitive," he shrugged. "It doesn't like 'hesitation.'"
"And after the rewrite?" Ruan Ji asked.
"After the rewrite," Qi Luo said, "if you choose to go back into the Hunter system, this new covenant will hang under your name."
"They'll find you are 'harder to use,'" he said honestly. "You'll have the right to refuse certain orders, to weigh some clauses from the mortal side."
"They might decide to dismantle you."
"But—" he pointed at the hidden priority line, "when they try, they'll have to look at these words first."
"The World Base-Covenant will ask them: Do you really not want a blade that prefers to protect humans?"
"If they say 'no,' the world writes it down—'Hunter system actively abandoned priority of human rights.' Next time someone digs into it, that ledger entry comes up."
"You're betting the world sides with mortals," Ruan Ji said.
"No," Qi Luo shook his head. "I'm betting it sides with itself—it's afraid of being written as 'a system that only destroys.'"
"And 'keeping humanity's baseline' matters more to it than a few gods' pride."
Ruan Ji listened in silence.
She'd never been a gambler.
Hunter training had taken whatever "reckless" impulses she had and sanded them away.
She worked off of clauses, evidence, orders—not off long odds.
But right now—
Orders had dropped her into the interlayer.
Evidence showed that in her original covenant, she was only a blade.
And the text itself, line by line, was read out by a Rust Street punk like a eulogy.
"...Write it," she said at last.
Her voice was soft, but heavier than any time she'd ever said "Understood."
Qi Luo didn't waste words.
He slotted the drafted lines into the structure of Ruan Ji's Hunter covenant one by one.
With each one that sank in, the World Base-Covenant let out a low, grudging rumble:
[Warning: Hunter covenant undergoing modification.]
[Warning: exceptions appearing in core obedience clauses.]
[Warning: personal variable priority being raised.]
The key-mark burned hot enough to make his chest ache.
Qi Luo clenched his jaw and treated it like weather.
On the covenant surface, each line from the draft board pressed in like grafted veins onto an old, cracking skin.
[Hunter · Duty Revision: under the premise of maintaining world structural stability, Hunter shall prioritize safeguarding mortals' basic survival and dignity.]
[Hunter · Right of Refusal: faced with orders clearly violating the World Base-Covenant's bottom line, Hunter has the right to question and refuse execution.]
[Hunter · Self-Preservation: executor's personal integrity (memories, emotions, identity) is to be treated as part of system assets and may not be stripped at will.]
At the bottom, the tiny line slid quietly into the "priority calculation" module:
[Hidden Priority: when divine gain and human baseline come into conflict, default to treating "protecting humanity's baseline" as the more favorable solution for maintaining world stability.]
At that moment, Ruan Ji felt herself shiver all over.
Not her body—the lines binding her.
Some of them loosened.
Some of the lines that used to link only to "Temple Command" split a strand off toward the other side—"Mortal Covenants."
"...This feels weird," she murmured.
"Like what?" Qi Luo asked.
"Like a bow that used to only have one arrow suddenly growing a spare," she said. "Before, I could only shoot one way. Now you can tilt it."
"Harder that way?" Qi Luo said.
"Yeah," Ruan Ji said. "Before, I just obeyed. Now I have to decide which arrow to loose first."
She looked up at the messy Chains on the Firm's ceiling.
"I hate complicated things," she said lightly. "But… at least this is something I picked."
"Congratulations," Qi Luo said with a small smile. "You now officially own the right to 'hard mode.'"
He pulled his hand back from her covenant. The burn of the Forbidden Sigil finally eased.
In the distance, the World Base-Covenant's warnings cooled into a few cold notes:
[Log: non-system modification detected in Hunter covenant.]
[Executor: Qi Luo (key-mark bearer).]
[Status: under observation.]
Ruan Ji stared at those lines and couldn't help a short laugh.
"They're tabbing you again," she said.
"Bill's coming due sooner or later," Qi Luo shrugged. "One more charge doesn't matter."
"What about me?" she asked.
"You?" Qi Luo narrowed his eyes. "To the system, you're 'corrupted data.' To me—you're a 'new Hunter.'"
"'New Hunter' sounds better than 'error,'" Ruan Ji said.
She lifted her hand in the interlayer and flexed it into a fist.
There was no weight of shackle Chains, no cold metal of a Hunter badge pressing into her heart.
Only that fine line, stretching from Qi Luo's key-mark and looping light around her wrist.
"When you decide whether to go back," Qi Luo said, "you can use this line to open your own door."
"Back where?" Ruan Ji asked.
"Back to the Hunter system," Qi Luo said. "Or—"
He nodded toward the crooked carving on the wall:
[Nameless Firm]
"Back here."
Ruan Ji looked at the four characters.
"What are you going to write me as?" she asked. "'Nameless Firm · Part-time muscle'?"
"We can make it sound nicer," Qi Luo said, thinking. "Like—'Nameless Firm · Witness Hunter.'"
"Witness what?" she said automatically.
Qi Luo smiled.
"Witness that from today on," he said, "there's a Hunter covenant out there with a hidden line that says 'when gods and humans clash, you're allowed to stand with humans.'"
"Witness whether one day, when that priority actually fires—whether the world admits that's the answer it wanted."
Ruan Ji didn't answer.
She sat quietly in the interlayer, watching the Firm's oil lamp throw flickering light over the words on the wall.
"Witness…" she turned the word over in her mind.
One more syllable than "blade."
And a bit more weight.
Far away, the Hunter system's repair mechanisms still wavered—whether to drag the "Ruan Ji" error back in and redraw her as she'd been, or simply leave her as a weird footnote in the logs.
In a place no one else could see, a rewritten Hunter covenant quietly closed its cover.
There was no Temple seal on the front. Only two small lines:
[Executor: Ruan Ji (not yet refiled).]
[Covenant-smith: Qi Luo (roster · deceased).]
Below those, in letters so small almost nothing could read them:
[When divine and human interests clash—prioritize 'human.']
The line glowed very faintly.
So faint that, for now, no one could see it—except the key-mark and the crack in the world where it had been written.