Gou Zai Punishment Division

The early morning winter rain turned into a fine, freezing drizzle.

The streets outside the Nanming branch were shrouded in a layer of gray, cold fog.

Chen Mo, holding a black umbrella, stopped in front of the familiar bento stall at the alley entrance.

On the tin cart, bamboo steamers emitted white steam.

The boss was wiping his hands with a blackened towel, his fingers stuck with years of stubborn grease. Next to the counter, a worn-out radio with peeling paint was playing an old opera from years past.

"Xiao Chen, just got off the night shift? Same as always, pork ribs rice?"

The boss smiled and lifted the steamer basket, the steam hitting his face and making his fleshy face shiny with oil.

Chen Mo nodded and reached into his pocket for some change.

Just then, the opera music on the broken radio abruptly stopped.

A crisp, electronic sound, completely out of date, rang out.

"Ding!"

The shop owner didn't stop holding the soup spoon, but his gaze shifted slightly, fixing on the radio for a second. At that moment, his eyes appeared extremely cloudy, like two glass marbles fixed in their sockets.

Chen Mo's fingers tightened in his pocket. The sound was sharp, like some kind of precision instrument being forced out amidst chaotic noise.

Immediately afterwards, a monotonous, synthesized female voice came from the radio.

The voice was dry and mechanical, with the distinctive sound of navigation voice prompts, and it carried an eerie quality amidst the white smoke from the steamer.

"Unregistered null data detected. Recalculating the cleaning path... Current progress: 5%"

Chen Mo held the change in his hand, his fingertips tracing the rough edge of the coin.

He casually flicked a coin away.

Clang.

The coin hit the metal cutting board and spun around.

The shopkeeper across the counter didn't react to the crisp sound; his movements as he scooped the braising liquid continued smoothly, except for glancing at the radio just now. But was there really one? Or was it just my imagination?

Not only the boss, but Chen Mo also glanced around and saw female workers slurping noodles under the eaves to avoid the rain, even turning slightly to avoid the rain dripping from the eaves.

Everything flowed naturally, except for the sudden electronic female voice, which caused no one to react in the slightest.

The more normal the street corner seemed, the stronger the nausea and disorientation in Chen Mo's stomach became. It was as if reality had been split into two independent tracks, being forcibly operated in parallel by external forces.

Two seconds later.

The woman's voice trailed off in the rain, and the old opera tunes from the radio seamlessly followed.

The boss naturally looked away, smoothly catching the spinning coin with his other hand. A smile returned to his face, and he even wiped the oil stains off his apron.

"The ribs are fresh out of the pot, so I'll pour extra gravy on them for you today."

The female worker next to me continued slurping her noodles. Someone casually complained that the rain was too cold, their voice hoarse but genuine.

No one noticed what was wrong a second ago, as if that dry, lifeless female voice had never appeared.

Chen Mo took the lunchbox with a blank expression, turned around and walked into the cold mist.

He didn't exhale a breath of white air that had been trapped in his chest until he reached the street corner.

That slight misalignment just now was the system using his common sense about modern life to fix the logical loopholes in the city.

That voice with the countdown was like a death sentence hanging over our heads.

The rusty iron door of the archives room groaned laboriously.

Chen Mo sat down at the cast iron desk and opened his lunchbox.

He chewed on the ribs, the bitterness from the bone marrow spreading across his tongue, as he mentally laid out the cause and effect of this city.

The system is looking for a target that is large enough.

If you don't want to be disposed of, you have to throw a more conspicuous bone at the system before the progress bar is full.

He looked at the "Nanming Passenger Vehicle Dispatch Order" that he found in the discarded files on the corner of the table.

In the hidden pocket was the old train ticket that had brought him to this place.

As my fingers touched the ticket stub, a strange sense of familiarity crept up my fingertips.

The feeling wasn't like fear; it was more like touching an old object that already belonged to me.

Chen Mo put down his chopsticks, opened the drawer, and took out a rusty single-edged razor blade.

The old train ticket was laid flat on the glass mat.

The blade tilts, scraping off the aged ink and red wax ink, leaving red powder in the center of the pad.

He picked up the teacup, dripped two drops of cold tea, and then scooped out some cheap government-issued ink paste, mixing it with the powder.

Pick up a matchstick and slowly mix it.

The pigment turned into a dark red.

Extract the passenger dispatch order.

Chen Mo originally intended to meticulously copy the document stroke by stroke.

But the moment the matchstick touched the paper, that sense of familiarity took over his wrist.

The movements were small, yet so smooth they made my eyelids twitch.

The matchstick moved across the rough paper without pausing or probing.

The Department of Punishment.

Three words were written on the paper.

Once the handwriting has dried, it reveals a yellowed texture that blends seamlessly with the old archives.

Chen Mo stared at those three words for a long time.

This document was flawless, and even he himself was unsure whether it was a forgery or whether this body was naturally meant to write this kind of words.

This anonymous, odorless instinct has become the biggest blind spot for the system's evil detection instrument.

He tucked the loose-leaf document into a stack of lists, got up, and left the archives.

The emergency lights in the corridor flickered, emitting a faint hissing sound.

The mahogany door to the section chief's office was closed, with a sliver of light seeping through the crack, but no sound could be heard.

Chen Mo walked to the door, bent down, and pushed the list through the gap. The sound of the paper scraping against the floor was exceptionally clear in the deathly silent corridor.

Turn around and return the way you came.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor, monotonous and steady.

Back at his desk, Chen Mo sat down and took a sip of tea.

The tea had gone cold and had a rusty taste.

five minutes.

ten minutes.

Chen Mo tapped his fingers twice on the table.

"ah--!!!"

A bloodcurdling scream, like a broken bellows, echoed down the corridor.

Immediately following was a dull thud of a heavy object hitting the ground, and the sound of the section chief haphazardly banging on his desk, like some dying beast making its last struggle.

The red alarm lights on the walls of the archives room were flashing rapidly.

The alarm, blaring like a bone being scraped, echoed through every corridor of the branch.

From the loudspeaker came the section chief's terrified scream:

"Seal off! Pull up the slammers!!"

"The prison van from the Department of Punishments has entered the city!!!"

The sound of military boots splashing through the puddles filled the air, and the entire organization was thrown into chaos, seeing enemies everywhere, all because of that piece of paper.

Chen Mo sat in the chair.

The red light rhythmically illuminated his wooden face, half bright and half dim.

He reached out and turned off the table lamp.

Outside the building.

A butterfly landed on the rusty windowsill.

Its wings remained motionless in the freezing rain, but its entire body, like a signal-broken image, shifted abruptly two inches in mid-air, the movement strange and silent.

Then, a faint hum of electricity leaked through the rain.

"...Progress, six percent."