131: Chapter 131 Tides

The fog in Jiangbei had not yet fully dispersed, but the letter from Linhai had already arrived.

The letter paper was removed from a waterproof document bag; its edges were wrinkled from being soaked in seawater, and the words written in blue ballpoint pen were crooked and slanted, as if the person who wrote them had been running while looking back over their shoulder.

"When the elevator goes down, the sea floods upward."

"Do not let anyone enter the second basement level."

The signature consisted of only two words: Tide.

Bai Ya projected the letter onto the main screen of the Grey Net and remained silent for a long time. the first bus in Jiangbei had just returned, and the partition walls of the Qinghe No. 1 Safe House had not yet been finished, yet the Fire Beacon in Linhai was flickering at the edge of the map, like a cigarette butt about to be extinguished by the wind.

"It's not a forward," he said. "The original passed through a data node in the Linhai Old Port District. The sender is on-site."

Zhao Ye leaned against the stone pillar of the hall's outer ring, his right hand wrapped in medicinal bandages. When Liuxia Passenger Station manifested, he had pressed his Demonic Weapon into the ground, and his arm had suffered significant backlash. Hearing the word 'Linhai,' he looked up at the map. "Are we going?"

"First, let's separate those who can go," Lu Chen said.

Not everyone who had won one round should immediately rush into the next. The remnants of the waiting area left by the first bus in Jiangbei still remained; Chen Jue, Lin Zhao, and Zheng Xiang had to hold the perimeter of the second anchor; Tang Zhiwei needed to rebuild the transfer process for the Safe House; and Xu Minglan was in the isolation zone monitoring Wu's condition. The only ones who could truly leave first were Shen Qinghe, Zhao Ye, and Bai Ya.

The Xin Huo Interface unfolded simultaneously in the vision of the three of them.

It was not a new task bar, but a confirmation of permissions that had been repeatedly parsed. The ticket stub left by Liuxia Passenger Station, the route fragments intercepted from the Spark Post Road, and the Ticket Inspector's old pliers had all sunk into the Core of the Torch. Those items could not piece together a second set of powers; they only added a layer of sharper bone to Torch's original abilities.

Behind Zhao Ye's Evil Suppressor seed, a line of low, deep text appeared.

[Suppression Domain: Use the Fire Seal as a boundary to define a place where no one may cross the line.]

He tried to raise his hand; there were no fireballs in his palm, nor any exaggerated light. Four slender Fire Nails floated out from between his finger bones, like red-hot steel nails, and when they hit the ground, they made only a very faint "clack." Yet, the fog around the stone tablet immediately retreated by half.

The Fate-Illuminating Bronze Bell in Shen Qinghe's hand had also changed. A wisp of extremely fine Purifying Flame rose from the old crack on the edge of the bell's mouth. The bell did not ring, but the false shadows all around faded by a layer.

[Illumination Realm: Reveal the boundaries borrowed from a rule in a location.]

Bai Ya's change was the least conspicuous. The mark on the inside of his wrist looked as if it had been gently polished by someone, and those originally dead Fire Beacons in the Grey Net suddenly gained a thin line that could look back.

[Patrol Lamp Access: Node marked; Patrol Lamp can be deployed.]

Bai Ya stared at the description for two seconds, then chuckled. "Alright, from now on, I can consider myself to have legs."

"Your legs are outside," Zhao Ye said.

"That's called running errands, not having legs."

It was rare for someone to respond to a joke in the hall, but the atmosphere didn't stay relaxed for long. Wu stood not far away, a whiteboard tucked under his arm. He had written more today than usual; at the very top was "Qinghe is raining," below that was "Han Yue is in the car," and only below that was "Linhai."

He stared at those two words for a long time.

"The sea does not receive people," Wu suddenly said.

Shen Qinghe looked at him.

"Cars take people away. The sea is different." Wu rubbed his temples as if trying to grasp a memory that was about to dissipate. "The sea waits. It waits for you to walk into it yourself."

Lu Chen did not press for details. He left Wu with an observation Fire Seal used only for positioning; the mark provided no abilities and would not push him to the front lines of a mission. Wu's name could barely persist even on paper; rashly giving him formal permissions would only make the anomalies target him faster.

The Linhai Old Port District was not close to Qinghe. The Spark Post Road was still cooling down, so Lu Chen did not force them over. Tang Zhiwei requisitioned an unmarked black business car, which was stuffed with containment boxes, temporary Fire Beacon racks, medical kits, and three buckets of hot water.

Zhao Ye opened the car door and suddenly saw a strange man sitting in the back seat.

The man was about thirty years old, wearing a wrinkled surveying vest, holding a laser rangefinder and a roll of old blueprints wrapped in several layers of tape in his arms. When he looked up, his expression was a bit stiff, as if he had just realized that the place he was going to was not an ordinary accident scene.

"Space Venerable?" Zhao Ye asked.

The man coughed. "That's what they call me online."

"And in reality?"

"You can call me that too."

Zhao Ye paused as he was closing the car door.

Bai Ya turned back from the passenger seat. "Don't mind it, at least it's shorter than Tyrannosaurus King."

The man's face turned even redder, and he hurriedly spread out the blueprints. "Underneath that shopping mall in the Old Port District, there is a freight shaft left over from the nineties, which was later connected to the port's drainage System. According to the current structure, it shouldn't have a second basement level."

"But the letter wrote 'second basement level'," Shen Qinghe said.

"That's why I was called here," Space Venerable took a deep breath. "A fake floor still has to borrow real walls."

The car drove out of Qinghe in the rain. In the rearview mirror, the lights of the Safe House grew smaller and smaller. No one said anything like "we'll be back"; the only sound in the car was the wipers scraping across the glass.

The alarm calls for the Linhai Old Port District had not stopped for half an hour. Tide stood guard at the entrance of the dispatch center, her headphones pressing down on one side of her hair, and a trail of wet footprints stretched from the direction of the elevator to her feet.

She had already watched the surveillance footage three times.

The freight elevator that had been out of service for years had lit up on its own.

On the buttons, there was no first floor, no second floor, and no underground parking garage.

There was only a number that glowed a dark, deep red.

[- 36]

Tide did not write the words "help me" in the letter. She later admitted at the dispatch center that she actually hadn't dared to write it at the time. Every time that freight elevator rang, a new unclassifiable work order would appear in the System. The submitter of the work order was a number that had long been deactivated, yet the addresses all pointed to the same location: the second basement level of the Old Port District. When she pasted screenshots of the work orders, Tide level records, and surveillance timestamps into a document bag and entrusted it to a night-shift delivery truck to take out of the mall, the delivery driver had just reached the entrance when the freight elevator behind her descended a floor on its own.

She did not look back.

Later, she told Shen Qinghe about this and asked, "Does not looking back count as running away?"

Shen Qinghe did not answer immediately at the time. She only said, "Before you know the rules, staying alive to send the message out does not count as running away."

When the car drove onto the cross-sea elevated bridge, Wu suddenly crossed out "Linhai" on the whiteboard. He stared at the black line he had scratched through, as if he had seen something he shouldn't have. Xu Minglan asked him what was wrong over the video call, but Wu could not speak in complete sentences and only repeatedly gestured at the elevator buttons. Finally, he wrote a line of crooked words at the very bottom of the whiteboard.

"Do not let it reach the very bottom."

The wipers swept across the windshield again, and the distant Linhai Old Port District looked like a shadow swallowed by tidal fog. The red number on the out-of-service freight elevator still remained at - 36, but in the next second, it suddenly went out.

A drop of water slowly seeped out from the edge of the button; the water droplet crawled upward against the glass and finally stopped next to the words "Descending."

That was not a floor.

It was like something was re-numbering reality.

Tide did not post the footage of the elevator skipping floors for the second time into the public group. She only sent it to Torch. In the footage, water first seeped out from the crack in the freight elevator door, and then the original - 36 on the display screen looked as if it had been wiped by something; the number suddenly disappeared, leaving only a red frame without characters. But on the original blueprints of the mall, the underground shaft was only six yards deep.

That was not a floor.

It was more like something was re-numbering reality.