75: Chapter 75: Another table seen by the official team

Gu Xingzhou placed three reports side by side on the conference table.

The first, the Jiangbei driverless night bus incident.

Sealed for three days, multiple casualties, remnants not yet cleared, some victims still experiencing persistent nightmares and auditory hallucinations.

The second, the Qinghe Safe House Night Bus remnant incident.

Disposal time: one hour and forty-seven minutes, no civilian deaths, remnants marked, path tracked, subsequent risks moved to observation.

The third, Luo Wei's mobile phone fragments and the old mobile phone delivery chain alert.

If Torch hadn't intervened, this batch of old mobile phones would likely have spread to civilians through the second-hand market, forming multiple points of low-level contamination.

No one in the conference room was in a hurry to speak.

The data was too clear.

So clear that it didn't need any exaggerated description.

A department head said in a deep voice: "This shows that their combat effectiveness is very strong."

Gu Xingzhou shook his head.

"It's not combat effectiveness."

He picked up a pen and wrote six words on the whiteboard.

Warning.

Marking.

Arrival.

Evacuation.

Sealing.

Archiving.

"The strong can solve an anomaly," Gu Xingzhou said, "but it takes a process to suppress the anomalies of an entire city."

This sentence made the conference room quiet again.

Someone suggested: "Can we try to incorporate them into the official system?"

Gu Xingzhou glanced at the person.

"We don't even understand how they discover anomalies, how they seal them, or how they protect their members from contamination. What would we use to incorporate them?"

"Then we just let them drift outside the system?"

"It's not 'letting them'," Gu Xingzhou said, "it's limited contact, information exchange, and boundary confirmation."

He paused.

"Also, do not push them to the opposite side."

A piece of ordinary surveillance footage appeared on the projection screen.

Outside the Qinghe Safe House, a spark fell in the night. The camera was interfered with, capturing only overexposed grayish-white firelight; it couldn't capture faces clearly, nor could it capture specific movements.

But the statements from nearby residents were very consistent.

They remembered someone had come.

They remembered the firelight.

And they remembered that after that driverless bus stopped, it didn't drive into the residential area again.

No one lost their memory.

This, conversely, made Gu Xingzhou care even more.

Torch did not wipe the memories of witnesses on a large scale.

They didn't seem afraid of ordinary people knowing that "someone is dealing with anomalies." What they truly hid were their organizational structure, member identities, and ability systems.

This sense of boundaries was very clear-headed.

Before the meeting ended, superiors approved Gu Xingzhou to submit a more complete record of the old mobile phone circulation to Torch.

The information included the flow of anomalous second-hand electronic goods in the Chengnan communication market over the past three months, a list of several dealers, and warehouse numbers that overlapped with the Jiangbei logistics line.

There was a line of red text at the end of the approval.

[Note: There may be other organizations also paying attention to this batch of mobile phones.]

Gu Xingzhou looked at that line of text, thinking of the names that had appeared in previous reports.

The Longevity Society.

They had been quiet for a while after the longevity lamp incident.

But silence did not equal disappearance.

Gu Xingzhou closed the file.

This time, he did not pass it through normal channels, but instead sealed the Materials in an ordinary file bag and placed it in front of the door on the third floor of the Qinghe old commercial building where a Fire Seal had once been left.

In the early hours of the morning, a wisp of faint light emerged from the edge of the file bag.

The Materials disappeared.

Only an extremely shallow fire mark remained on the door panel.

Gu Xingzhou stood outside the blind spot of the surveillance, saying in a low voice:

"I hope you are in time."

There was still one set of Materials in the conference room that had not been projected publicly.

That was the eyewitness records of ordinary people.

Gu Xingzhou opened the first page.

Resident near Qinghe Safe House, female, thirty-two years old. Statement: Saw suspected firelight falling at night, someone organized an evacuation, could not see faces clearly. After the incident, the child's persistent nightmares significantly decreased.

Second page.

Communication market security guard, male, fifty-eight years old. Statement: Multiple mobile phones lit up on their own, young people were affected by the sound, then saw grayish-white firelight covering the counter. No explosion found, no open flame burns found.

Third page.

Middleman of the Old Goods Circle, anonymous. Statement: After the Fire Seal appeared, the old goods involved could not continue to be traded, and those who came into contact with them would experience varying degrees of fear reactions.

These testimonies were messy and could not even be used as evidence for a normal case.

But the more Gu Xingzhou looked, the more he felt they were important.

Because they proved one thing: Torch did not turn all ordinary people into blank witnesses who "didn't know anything."

Ordinary people remembered the danger, remembered being saved, and remembered the firelight.

It was just that they couldn't remember the members' faces clearly, nor could they recount the full process.

This result was actually more in line with order than completely erasing memories.

If everyone forgot, then the anomaly would only create panic again the next time it appeared. But if ordinary people retained a vague impression, they would at least know that when they saw something they shouldn't at night, they shouldn't watch, shouldn't livestream, and shouldn't sign for strange packages.

This was a new kind of social instinct.

It wasn't something promoted by the authorities.

It was something scared out of them by anomalies and saved by Torch.

A young attendee couldn't help but ask: "Then should we guide public opinion? For example, packaging Torch as an official secret department?"

Gu Xingzhou immediately denied it.

"Do not name them for them."

"Why?"

"Because we are not yet sure if they are willing to be named this way."

He looked at the overexposed firelight on the screen.

"The more it is like this, the less we can be clever. We can suppress specific locations, member identities, and anomaly details, but do not forcibly erase all rumors."

Someone frowned: "Wouldn't that be equivalent to admitting that something exists?"

Gu Xingzhou said calmly: "The anomaly already exists; it will not disappear just because we do not admit it."

This sentence made the conference room fall into silence.

Finally, the superiors did not insist on a comprehensive gag order.

They chose a compromise plan.

Core information blockade.

Noise reduction for general rumors.

Deletion of high-risk videos.

But they no longer forcibly suppressed all eyewitness accounts of the grayish-white firelight as rumors.

For the authorities, this was the first time they truly admitted: the old methods were no longer enough.

When Gu Xingzhou left the conference room, he saw the sky outside was gloomy.

He suddenly had a premonition.

This city was learning to coexist with the darkness.

And Torch was becoming the most unignorable variable in the darkness.

What Gu Xingzhou didn't tell others was that he was actually very envious of Torch's process.

The authorities had more people, more equipment, and more resources, yet they were restricted everywhere in the face of anomalies. Every procedure had to be explained, every blockade needed a reason, and every casualty had to face the pressure of public opinion and superiors.

Torch was different.

It was like a knife born specifically to cut through anomalies.

Sharp, restrained, and with a clear goal.

But precisely because of this, Gu Xingzhou dared not touch it casually.

A knife can save people, but it can also hurt people.

Before confirming Torch's boundaries, what the authorities could do was not to grab the knife, but to avoid forcing the person holding the knife into becoming an enemy.

He wrote this sentence into his private memo, not putting it into the formal report.

Some judgments were not yet the time to be written for everyone to see.