158: Chapter 158 The Second Bell

When the sound of the gavel falling rang out, all the fire points in Qinghe dimmed for a moment.

The flames of the three anchor points simultaneously shrank by a section.

It was as if the Court of No Return had suppressed their flames.

Inside the courtroom, the black scrolls flipped rapidly.

The names of Zhao Ye, Shen Qinghe, Tang Zhiwei, Lin Zhao, Xu Minglan, Chen Jue, and The Arbiter were all written onto different pages.

The Scroll Keeper no longer asked questions one by one.

It began to deliver conclusions.

"Those who failed to be saved, dereliction of duty."

"Survivors, pending trial."

"Fire Keepers, guilt not yet exhausted."

Black judgments rushed out from the Archives, spreading along streets, hospitals, and resettlement points.

The words on street signs fell off, and the house numbers on residential buildings gradually turned white.

Someone standing downstairs suddenly forgot which floor they lived on; someone holding their ID card discovered that the name on it had faded as if soaked in water.

Shen Qinghe leaned against the archive shelf, almost unable to hear anything beside her ears.

She could only rely on the vibration of the Fate-Illuminating bronze bell fragments to judge direction.

The cost of the second toll was heavier than she had imagined.

She had pinned down a few judgments, which also meant letting the Court of No Return notice that she was fighting it for the position of "dropping the pen."

A black pen tip passed through the archive shelf, falling straight toward her.

Zhao Ye crashed over from the other side, and the evil-suppressing fire patterns exploded on the ground.

"Don't write her."

His palm pressed into the center of the black line.

The prototype of the Suppression Domain fully unfolded.

This time, the range was only eight yards.

Within eight yards, the paper pages stopped, the pen tip stopped, and even the black cloth hanging from The Scroll Keeper's cuffs froze in mid-air.

Zhao Ye's knees sank abruptly, and the floor tiles cracked.

He cursed in a low voice.

"Just these few seconds, hurry."

Bai Ya's crow shadows had no physical form; they were just wisps of black shadows flying along the Fire Seal.

Previously, they could only track along the Old Object Chain, but now, during the few seconds that the Suppression Domain paused, they followed the edges of the scrolls and drilled into the trajectory of The Scroll Keeper's pen.

Bai Ya's vision went black, and he nearly collapsed.

He saw countless rewritten records: some were written as deserters, some as those responsible for accidents, and some as never having existed at all.

Behind every page of false judgment, a small piece of real detail was hidden.

The Arbiter spread the scrolls flat and tapped his finger on a few lines of text.

It did not create complete lies.

It used the truth as a knife handle, then stabbed the tip into the most painful place.

"Found it," Bai Ya said, gritting his teeth. "Its handwriting didn't come from the Archives."

"From where?" Gu Xingzhou asked.

"From our own records."

Everyone's heart sank.

Torch, the authorities, hospitals, communities, second-hand markets—any review, any accident report, any sentence of "if only at that time…" could become its paper.

The Court of No Return did not descend out of thin air.

It borrowed the regrets left behind by everyone.

Before the three-city fire map lit up, Lu Chen first glanced at the names under the stone tablet.

He knew that the Law-Suppressing Bell Shadow couldn't be rung just because one wanted to.

That toll in Jiangbei was to stabilize the first anchor, the Fire Seal, and the Lamp-Keeping Zone for half a breath; the toll in Linhai was to fight for a path for everyone when the Tide Gate pressed down.

Now that the three-city fire map had just stabilized, any excessive mobilization could potentially cause a certain anchor point to go briefly blind.

But the Court of No Return had already spread its judgments across every street in Qinghe.

Waiting any longer would not bring a safer method.

It would be more people's names being written into nothingness.

Wu stood on the outer ring of the hall, the faint light of the name-leaving fire on the inside of his wrist very dim.

He saw Lu Chen raise his hand and suddenly asked, "After the bell rings, will it remember you?"

Lu Chen glanced at him.

"It will."

"Then why ring it?"

"It is already looking."

Wu did not speak again.

The Grey Net lit up all the fire points still glowing in Qinghe, Jiangbei, and Linhai one by one.

The Lamp-Keeping Zone, hospital corridors, port area Fire Beacons, and the safety lines beneath the old station converged into a Fire Map that was not complete but was real enough.

Lu Chen was not borrowing an object to suppress it.

He was borrowing the lamps that these people were still guarding.

Therefore, when the second bell tolled, every person in Qinghe who heard it had a certain face, a certain name, or a certain sentence they were unwilling to forget flash through their hearts simultaneously.

After the bell toll, it was not the lamps that recovered first.

It was the sound.

In the hospital, a man who had nearly forgotten his daughter's name suddenly shouted her nickname; in the resettlement point, someone took out an old photo hidden in their pocket—the face in the photo hadn't fully returned, but at least it was no longer a blank white; at the entrance of the Archives, Chen Jue heard Wu call his name.

"Chen Jue."

He turned back.

Wu stood in the rain, his expression still very faint, but it was as if he had finally grasped a thread.

"I remember that is your name."

Chen Jue's nose turned sour, and he immediately cursed him: "Nonsense."

Wu ignored him and just looked up at the circle of bell shadows that had not yet dissipated.

No one knew exactly what it was.

But everyone knew that this toll was not in vain.

The bell toll didn't bring anyone back.

It only delayed one sentence for the human world: This matter has not yet finished being judged.

Inside Xinhuo Hall, Lu Chen finally raised his hand.

The three-city fire map lit up simultaneously.

The anchor points of Qinghe, Jiangbei, and Linhai transmitted a very fine vibration along the fire lines.

The Law-Suppressing Bell Shadow, which had only rung once before at a critical node, slowly emerged from the deepest part of the Fire Map.

It had no bell body.

There was only a blurry outline, like the shadow of an ancient giant bell cast into the night sky.

Zero's prompt appeared with a lag for the first time.

[ Stability of unknown law-suppressing bell reverberation increased. ]

[ Currently loadable: one active law-suppression. ]

Lu Chen did not ask what its name was.

A name was still too early.

He just looked at that circle of bell shadows, remembering that every time the bell tolled, it was when someone was about to be unable to hold on.

Now was the same.

On the last page of the Court of No Return, The Scroll Keeper had already written:

[ Lu Chen, failed to save… ]

Before the pen tip fell, Lu Chen tapped the stone tablet lightly.

Not with his hand.

It was using the Fire Map as a hammer.

The second bell toll sounded.

Qinghe did not hear a loud noise.

Everyone only felt a jolt in their hearts, as if they had suddenly remembered something that must never be forgotten.

The black judgments stopped.

The entire Court of No Return, from the Archives to the street corners, from the courtroom to every black door, all fell silent for three breaths.

Three breaths were very short.

Zhao Ye let go, directly half-kneeling on the ground, the veins on the back of his hand almost splitting open.

Shen Qinghe steadied herself against the archive shelf, her ears still a blank slate.

Bai Ya's crow shadows, however, snatched back a fragment of a scroll from the deepest part during these three breaths.

There was no judgment on the fragment.

There was only one line of small text.

[ Plaintiff of the first case: Court of No Return. ]

[ Defendant: All those who failed to return. ]

Lu Chen saw that line of text, and his eyes finally turned cold.

"It is not targeting the living."

"It is assigning guilt to the dead."

The bell shadows faded away very quickly.

The flames on the three-city anchor points were all lower by a section, and fine cracks had even appeared on the edges of the Linhai Fire Beacon.

Lu Chen saw it most clearly; this toll was not taken in vain.

He suppressed the few tasks in the Grey Net that were preparing to continue the pursuit.

"Everyone retreat half a level."

"The anchor points need to catch their breath, and so do the people."

As Zero recorded the command, the names under the stone tablet were still quietly glowing.

The lingering resonance of the bell faded away.

The Scroll Keeper raised its pen again.

This time, it did not write Lu Chen again.

It wrote down a new opening declaration for the trial.

[ Insufficient evidence. ]

[ Please submit the truth. ]