139: Chapter 139 The First Night by the Sea

The warehouse at the Seventh Pier originally held a batch of old shipping containers slated for decommissioning.

At one in the morning, the shipping containers all floated up.

They weren't lifted by cranes, but rather supported in midair by a force surging upward from beneath the ground. The container doors faced downward, water constantly dripping upward onto the sheet metal. The warehouse workers were trapped on the central platform, the surrounding ground already shattered into tilted floating boards; if anyone took a wrong step, they would slide into the bottomless black water.

When Zhao Ye arrived, the first thing he did was not look for the Tide Lantern Keeper.

He first counted the people.

"Twenty-six," Tide shouted over the walkie-talkie. "There are six behind the eastern shelves, out of sight!"

"Space Venerable, which support can hold?"

Space Venerable lay prone on the ground, the rangefinder in his hand long since blurred by the water vapor. He wiped the lens, his voice trembling, "That row on the east isn't shelves, it's fake. Don't go over there. The real load-bearing point is under the crane tracks."

Zhao Ye didn't ask a second time.

Five Fire Nails were driven into the warehouse floor, and the Suppression Domain expanded with a roar.

This time, the fire patterns didn't just crawl along the ground. They pulled up five translucent pillars of fire from the Fire Nails, propping up the roof beams of half the warehouse. The black water hissed with a piercing screech of steam as it clashed against the pillars of fire, and many shadows of hands in the water clawed upward, yet none could cross that layer of fire.

Zhao Ye stood in the center, the fire patterns on his body already spreading to half his face. His feet sank into the shattered concrete, his shoulders feeling as if the entire warehouse were pressing down on them. Yet, those five pillars of fire did not recede.

"Save the people on the east first!" he shouted.

Lin Zhao rushed in through the side door carrying the Guardian Lamp equipment. The Guardian Lamp Seed was not yet fully stable; when the Lamp Barrier expanded, it was only about ten meters wide, but it happened to cover a pathway cut off by the water line. Chen Jue followed behind him, clutching a rescue rope, his face pale.

"I'll go," he said.

"Go my foot," Lin Zhao stuffed the rope into his hands. "Secure it here."

Chen Jue grit his teeth and didn't argue further. He wrapped the rope around a steel pillar, not letting go even as his palms were rubbed bloody. A warehouse worker crawled back from the edge of the black water, with only one shoe left, repeatedly crying out, "I didn't bring my ticket, I didn't bring my ticket." Chen Jue pressed down on his shoulders, his voice steadier than he had imagined.

"If you don't have a ticket, don't get on board."

Shen Qinghe walked along the gaps between the shelves. After the Illumination Realm expanded, an extra layer of grayish-white outlines appeared in the warehouse. The real crane tracks, the actual shipping containers, and the ground that could still bear weight in reality were all illuminated; conversely, those pathways that looked closer, brighter, and more like exits were illuminated to look like old photographs pasted on a wall.

She raised her bell and rang it, and a fake path leading to the east shattered on the spot.

Behind the fake path, six workers were huddled together on a floating steel plate. Two of them held Return Tickets in their hands, while the other four were desperately holding them down.

"They're jumping in on their own!" someone shouted.

Zhao Ye wanted to go over, but the Suppression Domain could not be moved. If it moved, the shipping containers overhead would crash down. Bai Ya's Patrol Lamp squeezed in from above the warehouse, trailing thin, bright lines of fire, first wrapping around the two tickets, then pulling back along the ticket stubs toward the depths of the port.

The ticket stubs were pulled taut.

The two workers' eyes glazed over, and different names appeared on the faces of the tickets in their hands. One was their mother, the other was a younger brother who had been missing for years.

"Burn them!" Chen Jue shouted from a distance.

"If you burn them, they will be dragged away," Shen Qinghe said.

She looked at the steel plate, keeping her voice very low: "Let them let go of it themselves."

This was a difficult thing to ask.

No one can let go on behalf of someone else.

Jiaoyue's voice cut in from the hospital channel. She was currently guarding the last lamp with the Linhai Medical Team. Hearing the intermittent weeping over the warehouse walkie-talkie, she simply said, "Read their real-world names to them."

Chen Jue immediately did so. He didn't know the family situations of the two workers, so he had Tide pull up the records. Tide read them out while flipping through the System: who lived where, who had just collected their wages last week, whose son had a birthday tomorrow, and whose car still had an undelivered lunch inside.

The ticket of one of the men slowly fell.

The other, however, gripped his ticket even tighter, suddenly broke free from his companions, and leaped into the black water.

No one was fast enough to catch him.

The black water didn't splash; its surface merely lit up briefly as a silent elevator slowly sank downward from where he had fallen.

Tide's voice cut out for half a second.

In the end, twenty people were rescued from the warehouse.

Six people did not return. Two had voluntarily entered the water holding tickets, and four had been swept into the interstitial space of the area collapsed by the shipping containers, leaving no trace to be found.

When the Suppression Domain dispersed, Zhao Ye knelt on one knee on the ground, the fire patterns receding from his face, his lips covered in blood. He looked up toward the far end of the warehouse.

Standing there was someone wearing an old-style deep blue station uniform.

It was in no hurry to attack.

In its hand, it held a soaked registry; the pages were flipped open, water dripping from the edges of the paper, yet not a single page was ruined.

Using a slender pen, it wrote a few words at the very top.

[Linhai, sinking confirmed.]

All the elevators chimed "ding" at the same time.

The four workers on the easternmost side of the warehouse hadn't all been swept away by the water. Bai Ya's Patrol Lamp caught the shadows of two of them at the edge of the Black Sea; they weren't dead, but had been dragged into the freight interstitial space of the Downward Station. The Grey Net could see that they were still moving, but was unable to lock down their route.

When Tide heard this result, her fingers gripping the walkie-talkie turned white. She knew that "still moving" did not equate to hope, but it was even more agonizing than "confirmed dead."

After Zhao Ye withdrew from the Suppression Domain, his first words were not to ask about injuries.

"Are there any other load-bearing points on the east side we can get into?"

Space Venerable shook his head. "If you go in one more time, the entire crane track will collapse."

Zhao Ye stared at the black water, silent for a long while.

Bai Ya lowered his voice over the channel: "Don't trade living people for a path just yet. It's waiting for you to do exactly that."

Zhao Ye punched the shattered concrete, his fist bleeding profusely from the impact. He did not step forward again.

Chen Jue untied the securing rope, his palms covered in blood blisters from the friction. Looking at Zhao Ye's back, he suddenly understood something he hadn't before. It wasn't that the strong could pull everyone back. The strong simply stood at the very front, being the first to see the parts that even they couldn't pull back.

After the Tide-Reversal Bureau wrote "Linhai, sinking confirmed," the streetlights outside the warehouse lit up one by one in reverse. They lit up at the top of the lamp posts first, then the middle sections, and finally reached the ground, as if all the light in the entire city was being sucked into the sea.

Jiaoyue transmitted a new piece of data from the hospital: the blood oxygen levels of Chen Li and the others dropped at the exact same moment, and all the patients heard the same broadcast.

"It's not just testing the pier," Jiaoyue said. "It's testing the entire port district."

Zhao Ye looked up at the wet booklet, the fire patterns in his eyes not yet fully receded.

"Then don't let it finish testing."

The Tide-Reversal Bureau deep in the warehouse did not look back.

It flipped to the next page.

A new column had already emerged on the paper.

[First Batch of Descenders: To be filled.]

After the rescue ended, Tide circled six names on the temporary list. She didn't write "deceased," nor did she write "missing." She only left the time and last known location next to them.

Hearing her silence over the channel, Jiaoyue said softly, "Don't keep the list all by yourself."

Tide nodded, but still didn't put down her pen.

At the far end of the warehouse, the registry flipped to the next page.

The names of the twelve buildings in the Linhai Old Port District began to seep onto the paper.