152: Chapter 152 The Nameless Man

The rain in Qinghe fell thinly, landing on the stone steps at the entrance of the Archives like a layer of pale grey ash.

Wu stood in the rain without an umbrella.

He had been standing here for twenty minutes; the security guard had asked him twice if he wanted to go inside, but he hadn't answered.

The third time, the security guard walked a little closer and realized that the young man was clutching a temporary registration form in his hand.

There had originally been a line for a name on the form.

Now, it was just a blank space.

"Who are you looking for?" the security guard asked.

Wu looked up at him.

The question was simple.

Yet he thought for a long time before saying, "I don't know."

He looked at the registration form over and over again, unable to even explain why he was standing there.

The Torch temporary liaison vehicle was parked on the side of the road.

Chen Jue jumped out of the vehicle, not having opened his umbrella properly, and half of his shoulder was quickly soaked.

He first saw the blank registration form in Wu's hand, and his expression changed on the spot.

"Did it disappear again?"

Wu nodded.

Chen Jue shoved the umbrella into his hand. "Get in the car. Standing in the rain won't make a new name grow."

Wu didn't move.

"After I go in, I might not even remember this place."

"Then write it down." Chen Jue fished a pen out of his pocket and wrote two characters on the back of Wu's hand.

Wu looked down.

[Qinghe]

The rain quickly washed the ink away.

Wu watched the two characters blur bit by bit, then suddenly smiled, a very light smile.

"See, writing it down is useless too."

Chen Jue opened his mouth, but couldn't find a response.

This was the kind of thing he feared most. You couldn't hit it, you couldn't smash it, yet it insisted on drilling into people's minds.

Since Han Yue died, he rarely said "I'll do it" anymore.

But facing Wu, he still felt there was nothing he could do.

Inside Xinhuo Hall, Lu Chen had the Grey Net pull up all of Wu's history records.

Footprints outside Liuqiao Old Station.

The temporary confirmation signed at the entrance of the Safe House.

The time calibration provided by Chen Shi.

Tide's duty log.

The action review written by Chen Jue.

The risk assessment Shen Qinghe made for him.

There were many records, but none could replace his original name.

Zero prompted, "The target's reality identity is being continuously stripped away. Currently confirmable designation: Wu."

Lu Chen was silent for a moment.

"It isn't erasing the paper," Wu heard this sentence through the Fire Seal and whispered, completing it, "It is erasing the reasons others have to remember me."

The car was quiet, save for the windshield wipers swishing back and forth.

The namelessness in Qinghe was no longer just happening to Wu.

Liang Cheng's food delivery order couldn't be found.

The platform customer service said there was no such order in the System.

Lu Chengzhi's dashcam footage was determined to be a corrupted file, and the original saved in-car audio was nothing but white noise.

In Han Yue's notebook, the pages that had been written with "Liuxia Entrance" had turned into blank paper without any words, not even leaving traces of ink bleeding.

Chen Jue held that notebook, flipping through it several times.

He remembered that Han Yue's handwriting was very ugly, with strokes that looked like he was in a rush.

But now, there was nothing on the paper.

What was worse, at one moment, he suddenly couldn't recall Han Yue's face.

He stood by the car door, his fingers gripping the edge of the notebook tightly, a stifling feeling in his chest.

"I remember his voice," Chen Jue said suddenly.

No one had asked him.

He continued anyway, "He said, 'Don't be like me.'"

Bai Ya walked over from the curtain of rain, water clinging to his collar.

He offered no comfort, only handing a spare mobile phone to Chen Jue.

"Record it."

Chen Jue looked up.

"Whatever you remember, record it," Bai Ya said. "Don't treat your brain like a hard drive. Anything the anomaly wants to delete, save it elsewhere first."

Recording on a phone was clumsy, and backing it up was even clumsier.

But no one dared to keep memories only in their brains anymore.

In the liaison vehicle, Chen Jue turned on the phone recording and said clumsily to Wu, "Say something."

Wu leaned against the car window, watching the rain slide down the glass.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you remember."

Wu was silent for a long time before slowly opening his mouth.

"I remember… there was an alley, and at the entrance of the alley, they sold soy milk."

"The owner was a woman with a loud voice. She would always say I looked pale and tell me to add an extra egg."

"I don't remember the name of the alley, nor do I remember her name."

He stopped suddenly when he said this.

"I'm not even sure if that's my memory."

Chen Jue gripped the recording interface even tighter.

"Just keep recording. If you can't remember later, at least you can listen to it."

Wu turned to look at him, as if wanting to say this method was useless. But in the end, he just gave a soft "Mm."

At the same time, the Safe House's manual verification team received the first batch of paper returns.

Many records remained, but strange voids began to appear: one person could remember Lu Chengzhi driving that car but couldn't remember who called him; someone could remember Liang Cheng delivering food but couldn't recall what he looked like; in a group photo, the spot where Chen Fu had stood had turned into a blurry white spot.

Xu Minglan wrote these situations into a table and finally added a sentence at the top:

[Namelessness is not the forgetting of a single piece of information, but the severing of mutual confirmation between people and reality.]

After this sentence was sent into the Grey Net, the faint glimmer of Wu in the Fire Map flickered gently.

The security guard at the entrance of the Archives was later kept to give a statement.

He kept saying he couldn't describe what Wu looked like, only remembering that the person stood in the rain, wearing thin clothes, and had the two characters "Qinghe" written on the back of his hand.

After hearing this, Chen Jue suddenly backed up that recording again.

He didn't know if this counted as evidence.

But for the first time, he understood that remembering a person didn't necessarily require major events.

Someone remembering that he got rained on, someone remembering he didn't have an umbrella, someone remembering he stood outside the door without going in—these were enough.

Wu watched Chen Jue busying himself and didn't say "it's useless" again.

He just folded that blank registration form and put it into the innermost pocket of his jacket.

Chen Jue named the audio file "Wu, Rainy Day, Qinghe Archives."

When naming it, he deliberately typed a few extra words, as if fearing that if the file name were too short, it would be easier to be erased next time.

Wu looked at the screen and suddenly said, "Don't delete it."

"I won't."

"Not this one." Wu looked out at the rain through the car window, "It's that when you can't remember in the future, don't delete yourself either."

Chen Jue froze for a moment, then cursed under his breath, "Stop saying such weird things."

But he gripped the phone even tighter.

That afternoon, the heavy doors of the Qinghe Old Archives opened on their own.

The Archives had long been off-duty, yet not a single light was on in the entire building.

A very cold wind blew out from the crack of the door, swirling a few old papers onto the steps.

One of them was as black as if it had been smoked through.

Chen Jue bent down to pick it up, but Wu caught his wrist first.

"Don't touch it."

The paper flipped over by itself.

On it was a subpoena.

[Lu Chen.]

[Appear in court within the time limit.]

Below, there was no date, no location, only a pale black mark.

In the center of the mark was a closed door.

The Fire Seal on the inside of Chen Jue's wrist burned hot.

The Grey Net gave a synchronized prompt.

[High-risk rule entrance detected.]

[Qinghe Old Archives, spatial state abnormal.]

Wu stared at the subpoena, his face paler than the rain.

"I have seen this kind of door," he said.

"Where have you seen it?" Shen Qinghe's voice came through the comms, pressed very low.

Wu raised his head and looked toward the darkness deep inside the Archives where there were no lights.

"When I still had a name."