Gray Chronicle

Chapter 12 The Two Ends of the Chain

Lynn did not answer.

He sheathed the holy iron sword back into his belt. The gray etchings on the blade dimmed for a moment as it was sheathed—not extinguished, but subsided. Then he crouched down, looking directly at Randall's face, whose pupils had been removed.

"Tok Copperhammer is missing half his little finger. Which hand?"

"Left hand." Randall didn't hesitate. "He writes with gloves on. The handwriting slants to the right—the point of pressure changes because his fingertips are missing, so the top half of the words is lighter than the bottom half. Archivists can read handwriting better than faces."

Lynn had seen Old Tork's hand, the one missing half a little finger. He used it to test the water temperature during quenching. He used it to pull the thread while sewing boot soles. When placing the runic hammer on the anvil, his thumb would habitually linger a little longer at the spot where the finger had been severed.

He assumed it was a forging accident. A finger broken by a hammer, burned off by molten iron—it wasn't worth asking about a dwarf blacksmith missing a finger.

But it wasn't broken by smashing.

It was cut off when the stone was being judged.

"You said he's a high-level Stone Judge," Lynn said calmly. "Why would a Stone Judge need to learn rune forging?"

Randall tilted his head. His empty eye sockets were aimed at Lynn, and his lips moved as if choosing his words—a habit of an archivist choosing his words, which he still retained after being imprisoned in the dark river for who knows how many years.

“It’s not something I learned. It’s something I’ve always had,” he said. “I’ve filed three documents about Tok Copperhammer in the Fourth Archives. The first is a professional registration application from the Hephaestus Federation—applicant Tok Copperhammer, applying for the profession of Runesmith, registration number FB-0391. The second is a secondment letter from the Temple of Aldric—seconded person Tok Copperhammer, seconded for the position of High-Rank Stone Judge, secondment period of six months. The third is an internal wanted notice from the Temple of Nox—wanted person Tok Copperhammer, charged with ‘forging professional judgment records,’ with the note: this person possesses knowledge of unregistered sacred iron materials.”

He paused.

"The dates on the three documents are reversed. The blacksmith registration is the earliest, the secondment order is in the middle, and the arrest warrant is the last. The shortest interval between them is only four months—from the secondment to the arrest warrant, four months."

Four months.

Lynn recalled the tone of old Tork's voice when he taught him his first lesson. "The core of rune forging isn't the runes—it's resurrection." A dwarven blacksmith uttering these words carries the weight of experience. A dwarven blacksmith exiled from the Commonwealth uttering these words carries the weight of a lesson. But what if this dwarf had also been a high-ranking stonemason—

This sentence is the translation.

He translated the essence of the profession, which could only be deciphered by the temple, into the hammer language that blacksmiths could understand.

"What records did he 'falsify'?"

"I don't know." Randall's voice suddenly became dry. "It's not written on the wanted poster. But I filed another unrelated document—the Temple of Nox's destruction standards for 'unqualified professionals.' There's a note in it: Anyone whose professional assessment shows that they do not possess any known professional paths is filed as a 'pathless individual' and will be self-destructed within three months. The method of destruction is not limited."

He smiled. A smile from a face without eyes is uglier than any other expression.

"I was afraid I'd be destroyed one day, so I went through the archives to check—how many 'Pathless Ones' had the Temple of Nox judged in the past twenty years? The answer was three hundred and forty-seven. Three hundred and forty-seven living people were judged as 'Pathless,' and then disappeared in various ways within three months. Some fell to their deaths, some were swallowed by the gray fog, and some were banished from the city and froze to death. Only one entry was preserved, which read 'Voluntarily escaped surveillance, whereabouts unknown.'"

"who."

"No name was written. Only the date was written—about forty years ago."

Ellie's finger twitched. She remembered what old Tok had said. Forty years ago, her master had gone into the deepest part of the dark river and never came out again.

Lynn remembered too. But he didn't interrupt Randall. Randall was now like a book that, once opened, was hard to close—you didn't need to force the pages; he would read on his own. It was the way of speaking unique to someone who had been locked in the dark river for too long: a backlog of too many things no one would listen to.

What is a "pathless person"?

“The temple’s explanation is—souls not chosen by any deity.” Randall pointed his empty eye sockets at Lynn. “But the archivists all count. Three hundred and forty-seven Pathless Ones, which doesn’t match the number of new recruits in the temple’s ‘Targeted Training’ program that same year. More were adopted than disappeared—where did the extra spots come from? I’ve calculated it. I was sent here before I finished.”

He suddenly stood up. The iron chains on his ankles rattled, and the runes at the ends of the chains flashed with a faint purple light.

"There's something on you. Not a knife, not a hammer, not that dagger—it's something else. I can feel it. It's 'seeing' me."

Lynn did not move.

"The thing on you is witnessing the damage to my rules." Randall's tone wasn't fear, but confirmation. "You're also a Pathless One? No—you bear the marks of a profession. But you weren't judged by the temple. Your profession wasn't judged—it grew on its own."

He stretched out his hand. His knuckles were prominent, his fingernails were long gone, and the skin at his fingertips was covered with thick calluses—the result of years of hammering into the stone walls of the underground river.

"Let me touch the knife at your waist. Not the holy iron sword in your right hand—the one in your left. The tempered dagger."

Lynn drew his tempered dagger and presented it to himself with the blade facing outwards.

Randall's fingers traced the gray, etched patterns on the blade. His method wasn't like a blacksmith's inspection—pressing his fingertip against the patterns, running it from the base of the blade towards the tip. He stopped halfway there.

"A patterned signature." He withdrew his finger. "I don't recognize this signature. But there's something beneath it—other information embedded in the underlying structure of the etched patterns. I can't see it, but I can feel it."

"You mean there's something inside my quenching patterns?"

"It wasn't you who forged it. It was when you forged this dagger—your profession hadn't yet taken shape, but your body was already following a certain path. Information about this path was incidentally recorded by the gray etching."

He turned his face toward Lynn.

"You're looking for ore. The guild's surveying commission—I overheard what you were saying outside. I listened for three days through the Dark River's telepathic communication. Six hundred steps downstream from the end of the Eyes tributary, there's an underground icy pool. The ore at the bottom of that pool is the purest gray-eroded crystal ore that can be found in this Gray Mist City. But something guards that icy pool—not a living being. It's the rules."

He sat down again.

"The Eye Path is one of the five career paths—the Observational Path. Those who don't complete this path leave behind residual energy. The temple's stone-judges call it superstition, but the archivists all know it. Many years ago, someone who walked this path died by the Cold Pool, and his career path didn't dissipate after his death; it remained in that place."

Remnants of rules.

There was a gray, ununlocked entry on the crystal slice—a rule record. Lynn looked at the entry and let it linger in his field of vision for five seconds.

Why did you help us?

Randall lowered his head. His face, devoid of eyes, showed no expression, but the muscles in his jaw moved—clenching, releasing, and clenching again.

"Because I've been imprisoned in the underground river for so many years, you are the first people to ask my name." The voice changed. "The people before me all asked if I knew how to forge iron—because I was recorded by a dwarven stonecutter, they assumed I could do it too. I don't know how to forge. I'm just an archivist. I just want to go back to the fourth archives, stand in front of the third row of cabinets, and arrange the documents by date. I have the same dream every day, that the key to the filing cabinet is still in my pocket."

He pulled a key from the inside of his tattered robe with his bony fingers. It was made of bronze and polished to a gleaming shine—nothing in the dark river was worth such repeated polishing.

"After you leave, could you please unlock the filing cabinet for me?"

Ellie spoke. Her voice was very soft beneath the Dark River Dome.

"The archives are on the third floor of the Temple of Nox. You'll be caught by the priests if you go in."

“It’s not about you going,” Randall said, clutching the keys in his hand. “It’s about finding someone for me. Someone who used to work in Nox’s Fourth Archives. He was sent away two years before me—for ‘possessing unrecorded specimens of the Judgment Stone.’ His name was Theo. If he’s still alive, he should be somewhere in the Lower City.”

Lynn accepted the name. Not just verbally—she memorized it. She placed it alongside the coordinates of the abandoned archives repair entrance given to her by the clerk.

"If he were alive, I would give him the key."

Will he come?

"No. But the cabinet in the archives has two locks. One is opened with a key, and the other with the blood of the Stone Judge. Theo knows how to open the other lock. You don't need to find him—just tell him the key is still there."

Lynn tucked the key into the inside pocket of his coat. The brass key and the crystalline salt particles made a very faint tinkling sound as they touched.

"Six hundred steps." He stood up. "How do I get to the icy pool?"

“Follow the direction where the sound of the water is weakest. The main stream of the underground river flows towards the place where the sound is loudest—the Cold Pool is stagnant and silent.” Randall took two steps back and sat back down on the pile of ore. “There’s one more thing. The man missing half of his left pinky finger—Tok Copperhammer. Before he was wanted, he slipped a document he wrote into the Fourth Archives. The file name was something like ‘Observation Record of the Pathless One’—it was autobiographical. I didn’t dare read it at the time. I only scanned the first line of the first page.”

Lynn waited.

The first line reads: "A profession is not a gift from God. It grows from the things a person does."

Quiet. The only sounds in the domed void were the water of the underground river and the faint, distant throbbing of a spiral.

Ellie suddenly spoke up. "What he said is the same as what you said." She looked at Lynn, "You said in the old canal—a profession isn't a name, it's what you've done."

Lynn didn't answer. He turned and walked towards the icy pool. Before leaving the cave, he glanced back—Randall was still sitting on the pile of ore, in the exact same posture as before, as if waiting for something, or as if he had already waited for everything.

The tributary of the eye narrowed as it went deeper. The torch was almost burned out, so Lynn pulled the spare torch from his bag and lit the nearly extinguished one. In the instant the old and new flames alternated, the dome was illuminated by a huge gray-eroded crystalline vein—extending from the top to the bottom of the stone wall, like a frozen green lightning bolt.

After walking 150 steps, Ellie said, "His key is real."

Lynn turned her head to look at her.

"It's not copper. It's a special alloy used by the temple—a copper base with a thin layer of mithril sandwiched in it. Only temple insiders can get their hands on this kind of key." She pulled a piece of scrap metal from her pocket. "I found a similar one in the junkyard. It can't be melted down. The temple's locks can only be opened with the temple's key."

Kirk interjected in a low voice, "What if that Theo guy had his eyes gouged out like him?"

"Then it's not helping," Lynn's voice didn't carry far in the narrow cave. "It's returning the key."

She walked another hundred steps. The sound of the flowing water began to diminish—not because the water was decreasing, but because the river was turning towards the rocky strata where sound absorption was stronger. Ellie put her hand into the water, and when she pulled it out, the skin on her fingertips was wrinkled and white.

"We're almost at the stagnant water zone."

Lynn raised his torch. Ahead lay the outline of a cave entrance—larger than any of the previous tributary entrances, and nearly perfectly circular. It wasn't naturally formed. There were chisel marks along the edges of the entrance—the entire opening was man-made.

The Holy Iron Blade was drawn from its sheath. The gray-etched patterns on the blade dimmed to their lowest brightness as it approached the cave entrance—not extinguished, but suppressed. It was as if something was suppressing the energy of the gray-etched crystals.

He stepped into the cave.

Before me lay a colossal underground dome, at least three times larger than the fire pit dome of the old irrigation canal. At the very center of the dome was a frozen pool—its surface utterly still. The water wasn't dark green, but pure black. Suspended deep beneath the surface was a fist-sized light source, emitting a constant, pale blue, cold glow.

A skeleton lay beside the cold pool.

The skeleton was intact, lying on its side with its head facing the icy pool. Its right hand was outstretched, fingertips probing the water's surface—but not quite reaching it. The fingers stopped a hand's breadth above the water. Even in its final moments, it was still crawling towards the icy pool.

A pendant hung from the skull's neck. It wasn't metal, nor ore—it was etched crystal. A thumb-sized piece of etched crystal had been compressed by some force into a nearly transparent sheet, the edges of which gleamed with a pale blue light.

It is the same color as the light source deep in the cold pool.

Lynn crouched down next to the skull.

He didn't touch the pendant first. He examined the skull's fingers first—the middle and index fingers of the right hand were deformed at the joints, bone spurs left from holding a pen for a long time. The five fingers of the left hand were intact.

He wasn't Old Tok's master. He wasn't a blacksmith.

He was a clerical worker. An observer. He walked to the end of the dark river and died by the edge of the icy pool.

Then he noticed the cracks in the skull's vertebrae. The third, fourth, and fifth lumbar vertebrae—cleanly severed. Not broken by a fall, not broken by a stone. Cut open. The fracture surfaces of the three lumbar vertebrae were so clean it didn't seem like an accident.

He remembered what Randall had said.

"There was a man who died by the edge of a cold pond, and his career path did not dissipate after his death."

Lynn reached out her hand. The instant her fingers touched the skull neck pendant—

On the crystal slice, a whole row of text lit up at the same time.

[Rule Recording (Perception)] 0.3%

【Ash Etching Forging (Basic)】1.7%

[Rune Awakening - Initial] 27%

There was also a line of red warning text that had never appeared before, floating in the center of the field of vision:

[Warning: A residual career path has been detected—the incomplete observation path "Deep Vision". The system can record the path structure, which requires manual confirmation by the host.]

Then, below this line of red text, a very small, almost transparent gray annotation appeared:

[Note: The slice does not assign a profession. It only records the path structure for the host's reference. The path structure diagram can be used as an imprint reference when forging rule-based items later.]

Lynn looked at the gray annotation.

"What's wrong with you?" Ellie's voice came from the cave entrance.

"There's something inside the skeleton. Not alive. It's the remnants of rules—I can 'see' it."

He pressed confirm.

The blue light deep within the icy pool suddenly expanded. Not an explosion—it unfolded. The light expanded from the size of a fist into an enormous light screen, upon which countless intertwined threads appeared. Gold threads, silver threads, gray threads. The gold threads were straight, the silver threads were curved, and the gray threads were broken.

Each line marks the rule structure of a career path—skill levels, attribute requirements, fixed conditions, and branching directions. The complete path diagram is like the entire skill tree of an observer-type professional being dissected into visible lines by some force.

But the gray lines are all broken. Seven or eight gray lines branch off from the main line and then abruptly stop in mid-air. The breaks are clean—not because they were unfinished, but because they were cut off. Like the three vertebrae of that skeleton, neatly removed.

Lynn stared at the broken gray lines.

He recalled the half-elf boy the clerk had mentioned—after two years of training, he was declared a "wanderer," and his pupils were gone. He also remembered Randall—who stumbled upon a file he shouldn't have seen and was sent to the Dark River that very night.

It wasn't that they weren't trained enough. It was that the path they were on was cut off at some point. The temple's monopoly didn't begin at the moment of judgment—it was that a break was pre-planned in the middle of the path. Those who reached that break were either destroyed or had their organs removed.

The temple does not monopolize professional titles.

It is the complete structure of the career path. Every career determined by the temple has a pre-set break in its path. Those who reach the break must purchase a deep interpretation from the temple to continue—and deep interpretation comes at an exorbitant price.

This is why Old Tok's master went into the Dark River. He wasn't crazy. He saw the structure. He saw the fracture in the weapon forged from ash-corroded crystals.

Lynn gently removed the pendant from the skull's neck. The thin, etched crystal flakes gleamed coldly in his palm.

"This is a remnant of his profession," he told Ellie and Kirk. "A complete structural diagram of the observation path 'Deep Pupil.' Including the parts that were cut off by the temple."

He held the pendant up, aiming it at the blue light deep within the icy pool. The threads on the light screen vibrated simultaneously—as if they had found a screen to project onto. The broken gray lines began to reconnect. Not repair—the pendant was recording his complete path before he was severed.

Then the dome began to shake.

The surface of the icy pool went from absolute stillness to violent boiling. A deep rumble came from the depths of the water—not the sound of water, not the movement of rocks. It was some long-suppressed, regulated energy sensing a resonant, homogeneous signal.

The icy pool exploded.

The water jet shot towards the dome, shattering against the gray, crystalline veins at the top. The shattered droplets refracted countless beams of cold blue light within the dome. Then, a stone monument, about half a person's height, rose from the water. Its surface was engraved with densely packed path lines—gold, silver, and gray lines—exactly the same as the structural diagram on the light screen, but much older. At the very top of the inscription was a line in dwarven language:

"Deep Eyes - Monument to the Observer. First Observer: Arsha Bronzehammer."

Copper hammer.

Not Tok the Copperhammer. It's someone much earlier. An ancestor of the Old Tok clan.

Then Lynn saw the last line of inscription at the bottom of the stele. It wasn't Dwarven, it was Common. The handwriting was messy but strong, exactly like the old Tork's handwriting he had seen in the old canal:

"I saw the break. But the break is not the rule itself—it's the scar left after the rule was cut. The ash crystals are the pus flowing from these scars."

Signed: Tok Copperhammer.