49: Chapter 49 Qinghe and Jiangbei

The Paper Sedan incident in Jiangbei was not as fortunate.

That Old Object had flowed out from the Old Object Chain. The buyer thought they had purchased a piece of folk memorabilia and even filmed a video to show off in their small circle. On the first night, the Paper Sedan only appeared at the entrance of the residential complex. On the second night, someone heard a bride crying from inside the sedan. On the third night, among the onlookers, two elderly people followed the Paper Sedan into the underground garage and never came out on the surveillance footage.

The authorities in Jiangbei did not react slowly, but they lacked the early warning and containment methods of Torch.

They sealed off the residential complex, cut the power, cleared the area, and put up caution tape. But the Paper Sedan did not fear power cuts or caution tape. It was carried up the stairwells floor by floor; wherever it passed, red paper-cut "happiness" characters appeared on the walls, and residents heard someone shouting "The bride has arrived" outside their doors in the middle of the night.

When Gu Xingzhou received the Jiangbei report, his brow remained furrowed.

It was the same spillover from the Old Object Chain, the same low-to-mid Rank anomaly, and the same involvement of ordinary people, yet Jiangbei had failed to fully contain it after three days, and several videos had already leaked to public opinion. By contrast, the Name-Calling Old Lamp at the Anning Residential Complex in Qinghe took less than twenty minutes from early warning to the completion of handling.

The arrival time of the official member was less than one minute.

The report did not use the word "Spark". Official surveillance only captured a blurry line of fire streaking across the night sky, followed by the appearance of a young man in a dark coat on the roof. The image flickered with static after he landed, and when it recovered, the anomaly had already been contained.

Gu Xingzhou watched this surveillance footage three times.

His colleague stood behind him, voice tight: "This is not ordinary travel."

"It is not," Gu Xingzhou said.

"Flight?"

"It is more like a coordinate-based response." Gu Xingzhou paused the footage. "Look at its landing point. The target is very clear. It didn't fly in from a certain direction but fell along a path we cannot see."

The colleague was silent for a moment.

"In other words, as long as they can mark the anomaly's coordinates, they can arrive very quickly?"

Gu Xingzhou did not answer immediately. He placed the Jiangbei Paper Sedan report and the Qinghe Old Lamp report side by side on the table.

On one side was three days of lockdown, multiple injuries, and a leak of public opinion.

On the other side was a conclusion in just over ten minutes, ordinary people who only thought it was property maintenance, and a child who mistook the Spark for a shooting star.

The difference was already too obvious to ignore.

"It is not that Qinghe has fewer anomalies," Gu Xingzhou said in a low voice. "It is that as soon as an anomaly rears its head, they press it back down."

The colleague asked: "What will the higher-ups think?"

Gu Xingzhou gave a wry smile: "Some will want to cooperate, some will want to control, and others will want to study how they do it."

"What about you?"

"I want to avoid forcing them into becoming enemies first."

On the other side of Qinghe, Bai Ya also heard new rumors from the black market.

A joke had recently become common in the Old Goods Circle: If you see a Spark falling from the sky, don't accept any goods. Before, they feared the items were not clean; now, they fear the items are too unclean and will summon people from Torch. Some said it wasn't a shooting star, but Torch auditing the accounts; others said that wherever the grey-white fire landed, a page of the Old Object ledger there would be burned away.

Bai Ya organized these rumors into intelligence and submitted them to the Grey Net.

Zero evaluated them.

[Rumor Value: Medium.]

[Organization Recognition: Increased.]

[Potential Exposure Risk: Controllable.]

Bai Ya looked at the words "Organization Recognition" and couldn't help but smile.

In the past, the rumors about organizations he heard in the Old Goods Circle usually carried blood and intimidation. Now, the rumors about Torch were also scary, but the direction of the fear was very strange.

It was not that Torch would kill people.

It was that Torch would come.

As long as an anomaly caused a disturbance, as long as an Old Object harmed people, and as long as someone used human lives to light a lamp, a Spark would fall from the sky.

This was more of a deterrent than killing.

In Xinhuo Hall, Lu Chen was also looking at the comparison between the two places.

The anomaly points on the Qinghe map were encircled by lines of fire, but the remnants of the Paper Sedan in Jiangbei were still spreading. The Grey Net could not yet cover Jiangbei, so he could only make rough judgments based on official reports, Zhou Yan's data, and the flow of the Old Object Chain.

The Spark had already given Qinghe the prototype for city-level rapid response, but cross-city response was still far from enough.

The basic Spark of official members could only cover one city. Higher Ranks could expand to the provincial level, and only further up would national response be possible. Currently, the only person capable of descending over a larger range was Lu Chen.

He was not in a hurry to expand the range.

The system had to be built step by step. The members were not ready, and the Grey Net anchor points had not been spread out. Forced expansion would only turn the Xinhuo Council into yet another organization that ran around putting out fires everywhere, unable to save anything.

But the Paper Sedan in Jiangbei was indeed like a letter that would sooner or later be delivered to his door.

Zero prompted.

[Official contact intention rising.]

[Gu Xingzhou is applying for limited communication access.]

Lu Chen looked at the prompt, unsurprised.

The comparison was already laid out before them. An anomaly that one city couldn't suppress for three days was ended in over ten minutes in another. As long as the authorities were not blind, they would definitely ask why.

And the answer to that question would sooner or later point to Torch.

There was also a deleted video in the Jiangbei report. The video came from a resident's mobile phone; the image shook violently, and one could only see the red Paper Sedan flash by at the end of the corridor, followed by someone screaming and someone shouting not to go over. After watching it, Gu Xingzhou did not save a copy but filed it into internal containment archives. He knew that once such a thing leaked out, countless people online would forward it as novelty content, until some bold person followed the video to find the same Old Object.

Qinghe also had videos.

The Spark captured by a child opposite the Anning Residential Complex had an even blurrier image, looking just like a bright spot falling onto the roof. Yet it was precisely this blurriness that turned it into a harmless joke in the residential complex group chat. One was the spread of panic, the other was rumors diluted by daily life. When Gu Xingzhou placed the two videos together, he realized for the first time that the hardest part of handling anomalies was not just containing the core, but also allowing ordinary life to remain ordinary.

He wrote this sentence into his new judgment: Anomaly handling includes not only pollution suppression but also the restoration of social order. The advantage of Qinghe was not just that a certain member could descend from the sky, but that after the Spark fell, there were people to contain, people to evacuate, people to provide medical care, people to handle the aftermath, and people to ensure the city still woke up on time the next day.

Gu Xingzhou knew that such a system did not grow overnight. Behind it must be rules, training, authority, and a core capable of suppressing all disagreements. The more this was the case, the more he could not let the first official contact turn into testing and coercion.