105: Chapter 105 The Wrong Path

As soon as Liuqiao Old Station was marked, the screens in the Safe House began to flicker.

The first distress message came from Han Yue's phone.

"I am under Liu Bridge."

The second came from Liuxia's old account.

"Don't let them enter the station."

The third came from Chen Shi's backup email.

"Time is thirteen minutes slow."

The fourth was even more disgusting.

It came from the navigation logs of the car Lu Chengzhi was in before he sacrificed himself.

"Recalculating route."

The fifth was a food delivery order for Liang Cheng.

The order note contained only one sentence:

"Customer requests delivery to Liuxia."

The Safe House instantly descended into chaos.

Some staff members instinctively looked at Han Yue.

Han Yue himself was sitting at the table, his face deathly pale, his phone lying in front of him, yet its screen was dark.

"I didn't send it," he said.

Xu Minglan immediately placed his phone into an evidence bag.

A hurried voice also came over Chen Shi's remote channel: "I haven't used that backup email in three years."

The person on the Liuxia end was even more blunt: "I've forgotten both my account and password!"

Bai Ya stared at the Grey Net feedback, his expression grim.

"Mixing truth with lies."

"What do you mean?" Lin Zhao asked.

"It means some information is true, some is false, and some is true information that has been corrupted before being sent out," Bai Ya said. "It doesn't need us to believe everything; it only needs us to split our forces to verify them."

Tang Zhiwei was on the other side, handling vehicle dispatch.

When she saw the navigation log from Lu Chengzhi, her fingers paused.

She had read through Lu Chengzhi's family records three times last night and written his compensation plan until dawn, drafting it like a cold, official document. Yet now, the car left behind by the dead was still being used to lure the living.

She suddenly slammed her pen onto the table.

"They are using the dead to pave the way."

There was a brief silence on the channel.

Bai Ya's voice was cold: "It's not the first time, and it won't be the last."

Breathing sounds came from Zhao Ye's end.

He didn't speak.

If he were to speak, he would probably just be cursing.

In Xinhuo Hall, Lu Chen watched as one corrupted message after another popped up, his expression growing colder by the second.

He did not descend in person.

Descending now could suppress one location, but it couldn't suppress this kind of scattered wrong path. The enemy wanted Torch to constantly rush to put out fires, constantly trying to prove that it could arrive in time.

He raised his hand and wrote down temporary rules on the Xin Huo Interface.

"All distress messages from the Liu Bridge line must undergo triple verification."

"Candidates must not respond to any private distress calls alone."

"Information involving accounts of the deceased is to be treated as a corruption source by default."

"Anyone experiencing memory loss must not be left without a two-person watch."

After the rules were issued, the chaos in the Safe House was slightly suppressed.

But Han Yue couldn't sit still.

"I can distinguish some of the information," he said.

Lin Zhao looked at him: "How do you distinguish it?"

"I know the people in the Old City, and I know which things are true. You don't recognize those names."

Lin Zhao frowned: "So you want to go verify them alone?"

Han Yue's voice became urgent: "I don't mean I want to go alone; I mean these clues shouldn't all be discarded as corruption!"

"Nobody said we were discarding them."

"But time waits for no one!"

Lin Zhao also grew anxious: "So you can just go get yourself killed?"

The two of them almost started arguing.

Shen Qinghe's voice came back from the scene; her tone wasn't heavy, but it silenced them both.

"Han Yue will provide the judgment, but he will not leave the Safe House."

Han Yue opened his mouth.

Finally, he lowered his head and said, "Understood."

Lin Zhao looked at him, feeling that this "understood" was too quick.

But the situation at Liu Bridge was continuing to change, and he couldn't keep his eyes on Han Yue for too long.

The night grew deeper.

The lights in the Safe House shone on everyone's faces, casting a bluish tint under their eyes.

On the other side, the operation outside Liuqiao Old Station was also being interfered with by the wrong path.

Lin Zhao received a text message from "Chen Jue" saying someone was knocking on the back door of the Safe House. But Chen Jue himself was under surveillance, and his phone had been left on the table.

Lin Zhao was so angry he almost laughed.

"It can even impersonate the living."

Bai Ya said: "It can, and it knows who you care about."

This was the truly disgusting part.

Accounts of the dead made people feel guilty, while accounts of the living made them anxious. It didn't need to fabricate anything elaborate; it just needed to knock on the softest part of a person's heart.

At the scene, Shen Qinghe heard Lu Chengzhi's voice coming from the waiting shed.

The voice asked: "Young Miss Tang, is the next train still running?"

Tang Zhiwei sat at the Safe House dispatch desk, her face turning pale for a moment.

She picked up the intercom, her voice terrifyingly steady.

"Lu Chengzhi has already sacrificed himself. All information using his voice is to be treated as a corruption source without exception."

After saying this, she pressed the intercom onto the table, her fingertips trembling slightly.

Li Xi saw it but didn't point it out; she simply pushed a cup of hot water to her side.

Han Yue returned to his temporary room and closed the door.

His handwritten notes were spread out on the table.

He flipped through them page by page, finally finding a torn piece of paper tucked in the lining of an old notebook.

The paper had already yellowed, and it bore his own handwriting.

"If you remember again, don't tell anyone."

There was another line of smaller text below it.

"They will stop you."

Han Yue stared at that line of text, his breathing slowly becoming erratic.

He knew this might also be an anomaly's manipulation.

But that was indeed his handwriting.

He recognized his own pauses, and he recognized that the last stroke of the character " Don't" always dragged downward when he wrote it.

Someone passed by outside the door, their footsteps fading away.

Han Yue picked up a pen and left a note for the Safe House.

He wrote for a long time, but in the end, he only left two sentences.

"It's not that I don't trust you."

"I'm just afraid I'll forget again."

After writing it, he tucked that page of old records into the inside of his clothes.

Before leaving, he looked back at the bedside.

There lay the Temporary Fire Seal that Torch had given him.

According to the rules, he should take it.

But Han Yue hesitated.

He was afraid the Fire Seal would allow Torch to locate him too quickly, and he was also afraid that if he were stopped, the path he had just remembered would sink back down again.

He knew this kind of thinking was dangerous.

He even cursed himself in his heart.

But when he reached out his hand, he still didn't take it.

The red line outside the door seemed to be waiting for him to finish making this choice.

Han Yue suddenly understood that the anomaly didn't force people to make mistakes.

It was better at disguising mistakes as necessities.

Even though he knew this, he still stepped out of the door.

So he added one more line to the end of the note.

"If I'm wrong, don't follow my example."

After writing that sentence, he capped the pen, doing so as lightly as if he were afraid of waking someone up.

He turned off the light in the room.

On the Safe House duty roster, the entry for Han Yue originally read "Observation."

Ten minutes later, Lin Zhao would come to re-examine him.

But the anomaly didn't give them those ten minutes.

It seized the moment when everyone was most exhausted and most convinced that the rules had already been issued, and sent a thread to Han Yue's feet.

Beneath the door crack, an extremely thin red thread retracted silently.

He could have called out.

As long as he called out, the person on duty outside would rush in, Lin Zhao would scold him, and Xu Minglan would press him back into the observation room.

In that case, he would probably survive.

But the path to Liuxia might also sink back down again.

Han Yue looked down and saw it.

He didn't call for anyone.

He simply followed that thread and walked into the darkness.