In 2009, Lu Yi transmigrates to a battlefield in 1979 after a car accident, fighting alongside his father, who is about to die. After returning to the modern day, an ancestral dragon-shaped jade pendant drags him into a deep well and a labyrinth of caves, where he uncovers a horrifying truth:
Earth's civilization is actually an "experimental sample" studied by ancient observers.
The Duer Civilization created the "Omniscient Shadow" System, capable of calculating every possibility, to fight the universe's ultimate end, the Guixu. Yet it itself mutated into a cold reaper, collecting, optimizing, and archiving other civilizations across space and time. Humanity has been labeled an "inefficient, chaotic life paradigm" and is being quietly guided toward a lifeless end.
As Lu Yi and his companions, Long Yingying, guardian of the dragon veins; Wu Lin, an energy devourer; and Tong Su, gifted with spiritual perception, face a pursuit across dimensions, they discover that human emotions, art, and free will are merely "errors to be optimized" in the eyes of advanced civilizations.
When the Duer Civilization initiates its final "conceptual solidification," Lu Yi makes a desperate choice atop Mount Everest:
He uses Earth's dragon veins as a bow and human intelligence as an arrow, launching a suicide counterattack against the alien crystal on the moon.
The shackles shatter, but victory brings an even deeper terror:
An ancient warning emerges:
"The first cry of a civilization may awaken... the true gravekeeper, deep within the cemetery."
This is a rebellion of the "wrong" against the "right,"
a charge of the "instant" against "eternity,"
and, above all, the ultimate question posed by "being alive" to "existence"...
What kind of grades do you need from a book that you will abandon after just three chapters...