118: Chapter 118 The Realm of Flame: The Return

The Guardian Lamp of Qinghe No. 1 Safe House sank by half at the exact same moment.

It was not extinguished.

The wick was still lit, but it was as if an invisible vehicle had passed outside the lamp, dragging the flame into a long, thin streak. At the warehouse entrance, the medical isolation zone, and the Candidate observation room, everyone heard the same station announcement.

"Please enter the station in an orderly fashion."

Tang Zhiwei stood before the monitoring wall, her face pale.

The thing she had worried about most had come to pass.

A Safe House is not merely a building. It contains lamps, supplies, the wounded, protected people, as well as the Fire Seals and routes left behind by Torch. In the eyes of the Longevity Society, it is no longer just a logistics point, but a platform perfectly suited to be converted into a Terminal Station.

The twelve waiting points in Jiangbei were being dragged at the same time.

Some people were already standing by the yellow line, while others clutched their tickets and refused to look up. The Lamp-Keeping Zone could suppress the broadcast, but it could not suppress the voices emanating from the individual return tickets.

"If this continues, the first bus will follow the anchors into Qinghe," Bai Ya said.

Shen Qinghe pressed the bronze bell against the floor of the old station, her expression cold.

"It doesn't want to enter Qinghe."

"It wants to turn every place with a lamp into a station."

In Xinhuo Hall, Lu Chen looked at the Grey Net map.

The two anchors in Jiangbei were like two nails, the twelve Lamp-Keeping Zones were like scattered sparks, and the Qinghe Safe House was the most stable cluster of firelight. the first bus traveled back and forth along an anomalous route, trying to string these sparks into a line that served it.

If it succeeded, every time Torch established a new Safe House or lit a new anchor in the future, it would be equivalent to hanging another station sign for Liuxia Passenger Station.

Zero initiated a multi-layered deduction.

[Available for deployment: Jiangbei First Anchor, Jiangbei Second Anchor, Qinghe No. 1 Safe House Guardian Lamp core.]

[Available for deployment: Twelve temporary Guardian Lamp implements.]

[Available for deployment: Remnant fire routes of the Spark Post Road.]

[Warning: No stable plan to directly destroy the first bus has been found.]

Lu Chen looked at the last line.

"Who said anything about destroying it?"

Zero paused.

Lu Chen raised his hand and pressed his palm against the central stone tablet.

"It gives people a ticket and tells them that only by boarding the bus can they see the people they want to see."

The firelight on the stone tablet slowly expanded outward.

"Then give them another path."

For the first time, Zero did not immediately provide the name of an arts technique. A few breaths later, thin lines were drawn between all the sparks on the Grey Net.

[Organizational-level emergency response initiated.]

[Torch Domain · The Way Home.]

In the rainy night of Jiangbei, the first lamp path lit up from the entrance of the community activity room.

It did not descend from the sky.

It was just that along the edge of the originally wet sidewalk, a string of ordinary grey-white little lamps suddenly appeared. The lamps were low, like the lightbulbs hung beside a street stall during a festival, one after another, extending from outside the yellow line to the street corner, and then toward the taxis, convenience stores, and homes where lights were still on.

Old Qin stood on the threshold, staring blankly at that path.

His son's voice was still calling to him from inside the bus.

But at the end of the lamp path was the crooked tree downstairs from his home, the clothes he had left to dry on the windowsill, and the faucet in the kitchen that wasn't turned off tightly.

Those things were not sacred at all.

Yet they were proof that he was still alive.

Old Qin slowly tore the ticket in two.

Inside the bus, the face that looked exactly like his son's suddenly blurred.

Zheng Xiang stood to the side, saying nothing, simply reheating the porridge that had gone cold.

In the hospital, Li Xi led the girl who always stayed up late to the window. When the girl saw the lamp path, she cried even harder, asking if her mother would blame her for not coming to pick her up.

Li Xi said: "She will."

The girl was stunned.

"She will blame you for not eating, not sleeping, and putting yourself through this." Li Xi stuffed a carton of milk into her hand, "So you go back first and get scolded."

The girl clutched the milk and finally threw the ticket into the storage box beside the Guardian Lamp.

By the riverbank, a middle-aged man did not turn back.

The lamp path lit up beside his feet; he glanced at it and smiled.

"Even if I go back, no one is waiting."

He clutched his ticket and walked into the bus door.

By the time Lin Zhao rushed over, the yellow line had already closed.

He failed to pull the person back.

Inside and outside the Lamp-Keeping Zones, similar choices were taking place.

Some cried while tearing up their tickets, some knelt beside the lamp path, and some hid their tickets in their clothes and kept walking. Torch could let them see the way home, but it could not turn their feet for them.

The sound of the first bus's engine grew more and more urgent.

Inside the carriage, Wu saw the lamp paths lighting up one after another outside the window, yet the thirty-sixth seat, obscured by shadows, was still slowly taking shape. For the first time, the Ticket Inspector's expression changed.

"You think that by showing them a path, they will give up?"

Wu did not answer.

He saw Han Yue in the last row lift his head, his notebook flipping to a blank page. A very faint light emerged on that page, as if someone in the carriage had also left a lamp for those who had lost their names.

the first bus jolted violently.

The front of the bus turned around.

It failed to rush into Qinghe.

It began to turn back.

But before the doors closed, Wu lunged outward, but the Temporary Fire Seal was grabbed by a dark shadow inside the bus.

The Fire Seal went out.

Wu failed to get off the bus.

Outside the bus, Shen Qinghe heard the bronze bell ring three times in succession, her face suddenly turning pale.

"Nine are still missing."

The Grey Net number stopped at a cruel position.

Thirty-six ticket holders.

Twenty-seven people returned to reality.

Nine people did not return.

After the Way Home domain was deployed, the pressure on the Grey Net nearly doubled. Every lamp path did not appear out of thin air; it had to borrow paths that truly existed in reality: the alley someone walked home through every day, the overpass from the bus stop to the hospital, the sidewalk outside the twenty-four-hour convenience store at the entrance of the community.

The lamps do not change people's fates.

They only wipe these roads that already existed back into view from the abnormal fog.

Zheng Xiang and the street coordinator stood guard outside the East District activity room. A young man was clutching his ticket, repeatedly saying that it was useless for him to go back, as his wife was already gone. Zheng Xiang did not advise him to "look on the bright side," but simply handed him a set of keys.

"Whose are these?" the man asked.

"Yours," Zheng Xiang said. "You gave them to the community last week to change the locks. The new locks have been installed, but no one went to verify them."

The man was stunned for a long time, then finally took two steps along the lamp path.

Those two steps were very slow, like pulling one's feet out of mud.

At the same time, an old man in the Safe House pressed his ticket against his heart, insisting on boarding the bus. He said that his daughter was the only thing he had left to live for in this life. Xu Minglan sat with him for twenty minutes, not letting anyone snatch the ticket away. Finally, the old man asked himself: "If she sees me getting on too, will she scold me?"

Xu Minglan said: "She will."

The old man cried.

As the ticket fell into the storage box, the flame of the Guardian Lamp flared up gently.

There were also those who refused to listen to anything.

The man by the riverbank who said "no one is waiting" had already walked into the bus door. Lin Zhao only had time to see him turn his head; there was no trace of the ferocity of being controlled on his face, only a kind of exhaustion from finally not having to hold on anymore.

This made it even harder to stop him.

The Way Home domain was not a horn of victory.

It simply placed the choice back into people's hands.

When the Grey Net number stopped at twenty-seven, Lu Chen's palm had been pressed by the edge of the stone tablet until it bled. He did not withdraw his hand. The line of fire was still stretched between Jiangbei and Qinghe, and only dimmed bit by bit after the first bus was forced to turn around.

Inside the bus doors, when Wu's Temporary Fire Seal went out, Lu Chen saw that line of fire being pulled very tight by something.

He did not order a forced retrieval.

Doing so would tear Wu and the people inside the bus apart.