45: Chapter 45 Letter from Another Place

Zhou Yan stayed in the old building of the Archives until late at night.

Spread out before him were several local gazetteers, compilations of folklore, and a pile of photocopied old newspapers.

The clues regarding the longevity lamp had not been fully investigated, yet the driverless night bus had emerged from the records submitted by Xu Minglan.

Zhou Yan had originally only intended to find some corroborating evidence, but the more he investigated, the more his back grew cold.

An old local gazetteer recorded that "The Night Bus does not carry the living."

A discarded newspaper in a certain city contained a small news item stating that years ago, a last-shift bus never returned, and the next day it was found parked in the suburbs with nothing but a stack of old tickets bearing the passengers' names inside the carriage.

Another folklore note was even stranger, stating that some buses do not travel by road, but rather travel through the "reversing hour."

Those who board may not necessarily die, but they will leave a period of their time behind on the bus.

Zhou Yan organized the materials into the Ash Record Book; the Mark of the Torch on the inside of his wrist remained slightly warm.

Bai Ya sent a message via the Xin Huo Interface.

[Scared, yet still investigating?]

Zhou Yan stared at these three words, taking a long while before replying.

[Scared.]

[But I'm more scared if I don't investigate.]

The other side replied quickly.

[You've made progress; at least now you're scared quite professionally.]

Zhou Yan, who had been covered in cold sweat, was so choked up by this sentence that he almost laughed out loud.

He adjusted his glasses and continued to categorize the external materials into "Traffic-Type Anomalies," "Lifespan Transfer-Type Anomalies," and "Old Object Chain Circulation-Type Anomalies."

The Xin Huo Interface suddenly lit up.

[External Anomaly Archives Module, initially established.]

[Data contributors: Zhou Yan, Xu Minglan.]

[Current permissions: Candidate assistants may continue to enter data, but cannot independently contact anomaly cores.]

Seeing the words "cannot independently contact," Zhou Yan actually breathed a sigh of relief.

He was indeed not yet prepared to face those things alone.

Compared to rushing into the scene, he was better suited to sitting among piles of old paper, unearthing things that others dismissed as mere ghost stories, and providing an extra lifeline for the frontline members.

At the same time, Xinhuo Hall was completing its first expansion.

In the council hall, which originally only supported stable projections for ten people, the fire patterns on the floor expanded outward in circles.

Candidate seats appeared in the outer ring, and the Grey Net map rose from behind the central stele, with Qinghe, Jiangbei, Linhai, and several blurry overseas nodes transforming into tiny points of light.

The inner ring still belonged to full members and high-privilege Apprentices, while the outer ring was separated by a faint curtain of fire; Candidates could see task summaries but could not touch the core stele.

Lu Chen stood in the center of the hall, watching the source essence released by the longevity lamp wick storage compartment being absorbed bit by bit by the Core of the Torch.

Storage is not the end; analysis is the next step.

The longevity lamp provided a life-state contamination model.

The Red Line catalog provided path marking samples.

The remnants of the driverless night bus provided warnings of "coordinate traction" and "path deviation."

Anomalies use these rules to lure ordinary people toward danger; what Lu Chen wanted to do was reverse them, turning them into paths for full members to reach the danger.

Zero appeared beside the stele.

"Hall expansion completion rate is seventy-two percent."

"Training projection area can be enabled."

"Grey Net maneuver path calculation area can be enabled."

"Generate test items for full member core standard skills?"

Lu Chen looked at the flickering anomaly nodes on the Grey Net map.

He recalled the Jiangbei accident in Gu Xingzhou's report, the external patients in Xu Minglan's hospital, and the few minutes when the longevity lamp fire spread at the auction site.

Often, it was not that Torch could not defeat them.

It was that they had not arrived in time.

"Generate," Lu Chen said.

A new line of text rose from beneath the central stele.

[Core standard skill: Spark]

[Status: Test item]

[Purpose: Rapid response to anomaly tasks]

[Learning permission: Full members]

[Activation conditions: Mark of the Torch, Grey Net coordinates, task authorization, anomaly presence]

[Activation prohibited in non-task states]

The firelight flickered on the surface of the stele, like a real star being ignited.

Lu Chen did not open it to everyone immediately.

He first had Zero perform stability calculations, then divided the training area into three different routes.

Shen Qinghe's investigation route required precise landing; Zhao Ye's exorcism route required landing cushioning; Bai Ya's intelligence route required low-trace manifestation.

The same standard skill should not turn all members into the same mold.

Torch is order, not the erasure of individual differences.

In the depths of the night, just after Zhou Yan finished submitting the driverless night bus data, a faint bit of starlight suddenly streaked across the edge of the Xin Huo Interface.

He thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, rubbed them, and when he looked again, it had already vanished.

Only one prompt remained silently there.

[External anomaly data has been incorporated into the maneuver-type rule reference.]

Zhou Yan looked at this sentence, muttering in a low voice after a long while.

"You aren't actually planning on researching how to travel from the anomaly's tickets, are you?"

No one answered him.

But deep within Xinhuo Hall, that prototype skill named Spark had already been personally ignited by Lu Chen.

The changes in the hall were not drastic, but they were enough for those familiar with it to notice the hierarchical differences.

The fire patterns on the inner ring seats were deeper, closer to the central stele; the outer ring seats were separated by a semi-transparent curtain of fire, like a circle of lamps not yet fully lit.

When Candidates entered, they could see task summaries and public catalogs, but they could not see the high-risk Old Objects deep within the storage compartments, nor could they touch the exchange confirmation for Ability Seeds.

The training projection area stabilized first.

There were no real buildings there, but it could reconstruct typical scenes such as old buildings, hospitals, logistics parks, and underground auction halls based on Grey Net records.

Lu Chen watched those scenes take shape one by one, knowing clearly in his heart that the anomalies members would face in the future would not become fewer, but increasingly complex.

Rather than letting them use their lives to learn by trial and error in reality, it was better to let them stumble a few times in the hall first.

Zero recorded this suggestion as: Training attrition is prioritized over mission casualties.

Lu Chen looked at these eight words and felt they were very similar to the hidden logic he used to write when drafting patch notes—players can die one hundred times in the training ground, just don't get wiped out at the start of an official dungeon.

Later, Zhou Yan wrote a note beside the record book: External anomalies should not just be treated as horror material; they are also samples that must be understood before the expansion of the Torch system.

After writing this sentence, he was stunned for a moment himself.

In the past, he only wanted to prove that those ghost stories were not fictional; now, he was beginning to learn to think in the way of the Xinhuo Council—record, classify, archive, and wait for storage.

After this night, Zhou Yan gave himself a new label.

He was no longer just an archivist afraid of ghost stories, but the first recorder of external anomaly Archives for the Xinhuo Council.

This title sounded very heavy, heavy enough to make his palms sweat, yet it also made him sit a little straighter.