87: Chapter 87 The Gray Web is Not a God

After the first toll of the bell, the Grey Net did not immediately provide coordinates.

This was rarely seen before.

Even with the driverless night bus outside the Safe House, the Grey Net could at least capture the remnants of the carriage doors and the trajectory of the red lines.

But at this moment, the underground passage of Old City East Station was just a mass of dirty grey fog on the Grey Net map, like many layers of different pollution stacked together, soaked into mush, and then crumpled into a ball.

Zhao Ye could not see the Grey Net; he could only feel the Mark of the Torch on the inside of his wrist burning in waves.

He lowered his voice: "Where is the location?"

Bai Ya's voice came through the communication, carrying a rare hint of irritation.

"There is no location. It's all noise."

"What do you mean by noise?"

"Night Bus routes, electronic tickets, the lingering echoes of the old bell, traces of Longevity Society deliveries, and this lump of something called the Clown—I don't know if it counts as a person or trash."

Bai Ya paused, "It's like tearing several anomalies apart and dumping them into a trash can."

Zhao Ye understood the last sentence.

"Then let's smash the trash can."

Shen Qinghe immediately stopped him.

"You can't just smash it. The teenager is still on the passenger list."

The second toll of the bell had not yet come.

But the tickets in the passage began to flip, and the iron railings behind the ticket gate opened bit by bit.

The Clown sat there, laughing until his shoulders shook, as if he were truly watching a game.

"The passengers haven't all arrived yet."

Zhao Ye did not respond, only holding his short staff horizontally in front of him.

On the other side of the Grey Net, Bai Ya was already busy enough to break out in a cold sweat.

He was usually glib because most situations were within a controllable range.

But now, the Grey Net popped up conflicting remnant alerts every few seconds, as if dozens of people were reporting errors in his ears simultaneously.

The Elf sent over the old surveillance distribution map.

[There are four blind spots in the underground passage. Don't take the west staircase; thirteen minutes are missing from the camera footage there.]

Li Guibing's people urgently sent over the old property ownership list.

[The second underground level was once rented by a scrapped mobile phone warehouse; the contract was signed by a shell company.]

Gu Xingzhou added the station closure archives from early years.

[The reason for the closure of Old City East Station was not route adjustments, but three consecutive track-falling accidents; the files were suppressed.]

Li Xi confirmed the station name the patients were repeatedly chanting in the ward.

"They keep saying East Station, not the Main Station."

The teenager huddled in the observation point, fingers trembling, but still added a sentence through Lin Zhao.

"The entrance I saw that day wasn't the main entrance; it was the staff passage next to the ticket window."

These clues were thrown into the Grey Net one by one.

At first, they were just scattered pieces of reality information.

Until Bai Ya used the Fire Seal to pin them onto the map, the grey fog finally developed boundaries.

Old surveillance point, Fire Seal landed.

Scrapped mobile phone warehouse, Fire Seal landed.

Staff passage entrance, Fire Seal landed.

Track-falling accident record point, Fire Seal landed.

The grey fog began to shrink.

Lu Chen sat in the Fire Keeper's seat, watching this scene, feeling somewhat more at ease.

The Grey Net is not a God.

It cannot see all anomalies that haven't been triggered, haven't been marked, or are obscured by reality noise, nor can it piece together complete rules out of thin air across a city.

But when someone provides clues, when the Fire Seal lands, when Pure Flame Vision sees the remnants, and when old archives are filed into the same map, the Grey Net can connect everyone's eyes together.

This is where its true power lies.

It is not to replace humans.

But to ensure that everyone's discoveries are not in vain.

Inside the underground passage, Shen Qinghe activated Pure Flame Vision.

The cold white flames reflected in her eyes, and she saw, within the mass of pollution behind the Clown, the shadow of a black bronze bell hanging above an abandoned track.

The sound of the bell did not come from her ears.

It rang within the rules.

"Rear right, old track entrance," Shen Qinghe said. "The bell is there."

Zhao Ye moved immediately.

The Clown looked up abruptly, his smile stiffening.

"Hey, no peeking at the answers."

Zhao Ye still ignored him, rushing over by stepping on the edge of the ticket gate.

The Clown raised his hand, and several tickets flew out like blades.

Zhao Ye blocked two of them with his short staff; the third grazed his arm, immediately tearing a hole in his sleeve.

Bai Ya's Fire Seal landed on the edge of the ticket gate, preventing the tickets from spreading further.

On his side, Lin Zhao pulled the teenager away from the window of the observation point.

The teenager asked while trembling, "Did it see me?"

Lin Zhao pulled the curtains shut tight.

"It saw the ticket, not you."

"Is there a difference?"

"Yes," Lin Zhao gritted his teeth, "tickets can be torn."

In the ward, Xu Minglan and Li Xi pushed the three patients into the range of the Guardian Lamp together.

Li Xi moved quickly, cursing as she did: "Can't you things stop picking the night shift to come?"

Xu Minglan almost laughed at her curse.

The second toll of the bell rang out at this moment.

Dang—

The grey fog completely converged.

Above the old track entrance, the phantom of a black bronze bell finally emerged.

The bell body was incomplete, as if it had been taken apart by something and then put back together.

There were no characters on the bell's surface, only circles of old red thread wrapped around the edges.

Zero's prompt appeared.

[High-level rule fragment reaction detected.]

Lu Chen sat up slightly.

Bai Ya, while pinning Fire Seals, felt that he would sooner or later be worked to death by these people.

Zhao Ye in the front saying "Smash it or not," Shen Qinghe at the scene saying "Can't smash it," the Elf in the channel frantically adding data, and the file format from Gu Xingzhou's side didn't match Li Guibing's warehouse list at all.

If this were an ordinary spreadsheet, he would have kicked everyone out of the collaborative document long ago.

But this was an anomaly scene.

Every piece of chaotic, poorly formatted data could correspond to a person who wasn't dead yet.

Bai Ya cursed, but he didn't stop working.

He forced the surveillance points provided by the Elf to align with Gu Xingzhou's track-falling archives, and picked out several addresses in Li Guibing's old warehouse list that had clearly been tampered with.

"There's a problem with Li Guibing's list."

Zhao Ye was dodging tickets and asked in the spare moment: "Is he setting us up?"

"No," Bai Ya said quickly, "his people were set up too. Two of the warehouse addresses here were altered later; the old addresses were right on the second basement level of East Station."

Tang Zhiwei remotely accessed the real-world data and quickly added: "I found the lease registration. The leasing company was deregistered three years ago, and the legal representative is a person who has already passed away."

Zhao Ye was so annoyed he wanted to curse.

"Dead people rent warehouses too?"

Bai Ya sneered: "It's not like the Old Goods Circle hasn't done even more outrageous things."

These people were arguing messily, but the Grey Net was becoming clear bit by bit amidst this chaos.

Lu Chen watched as those clues were organized, pinned, and archived, suddenly feeling that this was more important than any single-person manifestation.

No matter how strong one person is, they can only see what is in front of them.

Only when a net truly takes shape can countless incomplete eyes be connected into a field of vision.

This is not an ordinary anomaly remnant.

It's not just about connecting a few more intelligence sources, but about telling everyone that the boundaries of the Grey Net can be pushed outwards bit by bit by people.

Every ordinary person's testimony, every piece of old surveillance footage, every Fire Seal—they are all nails pinning vague anomalies into real-world coordinates.

This is a rule that can be taken back.