“Every breath you take is making a warm nest for Its arrival.”
Late one night, programmer Chen Zhou is forced to begin a bizarre dissection livestream.
The fish corpse with a human face beneath his scalpel conceals the space agency’s top-secret code. A “rotting heart” donated by a viewer takes physical form in the real world, and the System’s cold notification tells him:
“Congratulations on advancing to [Sequence 9: Peeker]. Mutation progress: 1%.”
This is a world being devoured by “corruption.”
Transparent Wall-Eaters crawl beneath the glass facades of skyscrapers, subway tunnels connect to wastelands of flesh, and a bronze door of Cthulhu sleeps beneath a mental hospital.
Humans gain supernatural powers through forbidden knowledge, at the cost of becoming twisted vessels.
But Chen Zhou’s System is utterly insane:
Devour rotting flesh to unlock sequences, use mutated organs to unravel the truth, and livestream your own descent to a million viewers.
When he cuts open the fish-man corpse’s abdomen and finds his own employee badge;
when he is forced to sacrifice his friends and family to advance, and the Eye of Cthulhu appears on his skin;
when the Big Dipper satellites form a Yellow Sign in low Earth orbit, and the cry of a baby from the Crimson Superbrain echoes up from the planet’s core…
At last, he sees the truth:
At the age of seven, he was implanted with a “corruption meme.” His mother’s disappearance was part of an arrival ritual that has lasted twenty years.
And every sequence rewarded by the System is a forceps custom-made for him by an ancient god.
“If the world wants me to become a monster, then I’ll become the most terrifying evil god of all.”
If you want to challenge the limits of your brain, this is a good book
It's not bad, but how do you write it? Aren't you afraid of it?