When the cockroaches in the psychiatric hospital began growing a third compound eye, Lin Ye wrote the same entry for the 1,024th time in a patient's chart. As the most ordinary orderly at Qingshan Psychiatric Hospital, he had never imagined that those absurd "symptoms" were distress signals from a prehistoric civilization. The trembling lines on a delusional old man's palm were a star map, the bytes screamed by a manic teenager were a code, and Patient 7, who spent every day facing the wall, had carved a countdown to a future war into it.
When Lin Ye devoured his first mutated creature, starlike patterns began to appear in his left eye, which was turning gray and white. A System called the "Abyss" awakened in his mind. Every Esper became a dish on his menu, and every act of consumption unlocked another segment of humanity's altered genetic code. The bloody runes in the underground containment zone, the alien pupils of the War Academy's upper echelons, the tombstone of a civilization beneath the Antarctic ice... This battle against the gods, waged across seven eras, had already been set on its path to restart when he cared for the patient who called himself a "Godslayer."
"What's the price?" Lin Ye gripped the pocket watch the director handed him. Its face reflected three hundred versions of himself from parallel timelines. The alien mother nest hovering over the Pacific was exhaling nebulae. The godslaying weapons buried beneath the Vatican were beginning to roar. And in his gray-white left eye was the last prophecy of the First Observer: When Earth's flame of civilization is lit for the eighth time, the reapers will stand above the Abyss of Time and witness their prey tear the gods apart.
At that moment, alarms rang around the world. The first artificial black hole collapsed above the Magic City. Lin Ye bit through the mental suppressant in his mouth as a blood-red warning flashed across his retina: Consumption progress, 99.9%. Final evolution option...
