122: Chapter 122 Chen Fu's Granary Gate

The door to the supply warehouse did not open immediately.

Chen Fu stood outside the door and first had people bring over two sets of emergency lighting from the fire escape, then asked Tang Zhiwei for the inventory entry and exit records from the past three months.

He spread the papers on the corridor floor, weighed down the curled corners, and compared the serial numbers page by page.

Lin Zhao watched from the side, feeling a headache coming on.

"Is looking at the records useful now?"

"Yes." Chen Fu didn't even look up. "If the anomaly grew out of the door out of thin air, looking at them would be useless. Since it has set its sights on the warehouse, something must have been brought in."

He pointed to one of the lines.

"Who received this batch of sealed boxes?"

Tang Zhiwei leaned over to take a look. The serial number indicated a transfer from the Beicheng Logistics Warehouse, the source was listed as discarded office supplies, and the entry time was two weeks before the outbreak of the first bus in Jiangbei.

"There was no abnormal reaction at the time."

"That's because it hadn't reached the station yet," Chen Fu said.

He scrolled down through the same batch of serial numbers and discovered three seemingly unrelated items mixed in: a discarded bus stop sign bracket, returned cardboard boxes, and old hospital filing cabinets.

Each item came from a different channel, but in the warehouse System, they all eventually passed through the same transfer code.

Liuxia Passenger Station · Off-site Freight Yard.

That line of text was not written on the records.

It was Chen Fu who stacked the tail numbers of the three entry batches together to spot a recurring number.

The Grey Net traced the number back and pulled up old photos of the Beicheng abandoned logistics warehouse.

In the photos, there was once a person wearing a ticket inspector's hat stamping the cardboard boxes.

"They had already slipped the ticket in long ago," Tang Zhiwei said.

Chen Fu nodded.

"They didn't just decide to open the warehouse door today."

He had Lin Zhao clear out the third row of shelves outside the warehouse in advance, and asked Xu Minglan to move all paper records with names in the medical area away.

Tang Zhiwei wanted to send people to move all the sealed items out of the warehouse, but Chen Fu immediately shook his head.

"Moving them now is the same as lining up for it."

"Then what should we do?"

"Inventory first."

Chen Fu said curtly.

He put on gloves, opened the maintenance cover by the door, and pulled out the backup lighting wire from inside.

When the tip of the wire brushed against the yellow line, a burnt smell wafted up. Chen Fu did not pull back his hand; he just handed the wire to Lin Zhao.

"See that? It's not trying to turn the door into a station."

Lin Zhao frowned.

"It wants to turn every entry and exit route of the warehouse into a boarding gate."

The beeping sound rang out from inside the warehouse door again.

This time it was closer.

Chen Fu inserted the key into the lock and stopped halfway through turning it.

"When I open the door in a moment, don't you come in," he said to Lin Zhao.

"You shouldn't go in alone either."

"I have to go in to check the shelves."

"You are a Candidate, not the warehouse door."

Chen Fu paused, and actually let out a laugh.

"In the past, I really was the warehouse door. Whoever wanted to enter or exit had to come to me."

Tang Zhiwei stood behind him, her voice cooling down: "Chen Fu."

He turned back.

"You can go in and look," Tang Zhiwei said, "but before you go in, tell me how you plan to come out."

Chen Fu was silent for a moment, then pointed to the ventilation duct at the top of the warehouse, and then to the forklift aisle at the very back.

"If the yellow line spreads along the main door, I'll come out through the rear passage. If the rear passage turns yellow too, I'll topple the innermost row of shelves to block the line."

"The shelves will crush people if they fall," Lin Zhao said.

"That's why you shouldn't stand inside."

Tang Zhiwei did not stop him again.

She took a basic Fire Seal sticker from the tool cabinet and applied it to the inside of Chen Fu's wrist.

It wasn't an Ability Seed, and it couldn't help him fight anything. It could only provide a location to the Grey Net when he left the range of the Guardian Lamp.

"Don't push yourself," she said.

Chen Fu nodded.

The warehouse door was pulled open a crack.

There were no vehicles inside.

There were only rows of neatly stacked cardboard boxes, with dust settling on their surfaces.

But the forklift usually used for moving heavy items at the very back was parked in the aisle, facing away from the door.

Its taillights were flashing, and the reversing alarm was beeping incessantly.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Chen Fu walked in, first looking at the shelf serial numbers, then at the floor.

The yellow line had already crawled out from under the forklift tires, winding around crates of supplies, as if someone had used yellow chalk to draw a waiting line in the warehouse.

He crouched down and felt a blank return ticket under the forklift seat.

There was no train/bus number on the ticket.

Only a line of text slowly seeped out.

[Substitute Passenger: Chen Fu]

Chen Fu ultimately did not open the door completely right away.

He only raised the roller shutter to a height that a person could crawl through, and lay on the ground to look inside.

The air in the warehouse was much colder than in the corridor, yet the dust accumulated on the cardboard boxes was not disturbed by the wind.

The forklift was parked at the end of the aisle; the key was clearly inserted in the ignition, yet no one was sitting in the driver's seat.

The first thing Chen Fu saw were the shelf serial numbers.

Zone A, Zone B, Zone C—they were all still the labels he had personally applied last week.

But below each label, there was an extra line of small black text, like the destination on a shipping manifest.

Zone A: Waiting for boarding.

Zone B: Waiting for boarding.

Zone C: Waiting for boarding.

Chen Fu's heart sank.

He did not go in, but instead used a long-handled clamp to retrieve an inventory exit slip from the floor through the gap in the door.

Seventeen item serial numbers were printed on the slip, but the sign-off column at the end had been filled with names.

Some of those names came from the missing persons of the first bus in Jiangbei, and others were ordinary people currently evacuating from the Qinghe Safe House.

This was not simple contamination.

It was using the warehouse System to take attendance.

Chen Fu handed the exit slip to Tang Zhiwei, his voice tight: "The shelves cannot be toppled randomly. It has already treated every compartment as a seat."

Tang Zhiwei frowned: "Then let's cut off the serial numbers first."

"If you cut them, it will reorder them," Chen Fu said. "We have to make it so that it doesn't know which box is supposed to go where."

He had Lin Zhao find a marker and tape, and they painted over all the storage location serial numbers reachable from outside the door.

The warehouse table, which had been so neat it was almost obsessive-compulsive, was painted completely black.

Chen Fu watched as the records he had created were destroyed, his face twitching in distress.

Lin Zhao asked: "Can't bear to part with them?"

"I can't," Chen Fu said, "but it's better than losing people."

In the distance, the forklift alert sound stopped once, then started up again.

This time, the sound was half a meter closer from the gap in the door.

The cold air from the gap in the door was getting heavier.

When Chen Fu was lying on the ground observing, he saw an old cardboard box slowly turn in a different direction; the original "Discarded Filing Cabinet Parts" on the box body had been covered over by black text, changing to "Luggage for Boarding."

He immediately had people tear off the text on the outside of all the cardboard boxes.

Lin Zhao tore at them until his fingers were sore, and couldn't help asking: "How will we find them after tearing them off?"

"Rely on human memory," Chen Fu said.

"Aren't you the one who hates relying on human memory the most?"

"I hate it doing the remembering for us even more."

After he finished speaking, he himself was stunned for a moment.

In the past, he always felt that every item in the warehouse had to have a serial number, a location, and a flow path. He never expected that one day, the neatest records would instead become a convenience for the anomaly to take attendance.

After hearing this, Tang Zhiwei immediately had the outside synchronize and change the tables.

She did not destroy the original ledgers, but instead converted them into encrypted records visible only within the Xin Huo Interface.

In reality, all that could be seen was a row of irregular black boxes.