When the first meteor fragment pierced the atmosphere, humanity thought it was merely an astronomical phenomenon. It wasn't until flocks of pigeons in New York's Central Park collapsed into pixelated points of light before everyone's eyes that people realized the truth: this impact was the Creator's command to reformat all carbon-based life.
The infected "Source-Touched" were no ordinary zombies. Fluorescent blue code patterns flowed across their skin, their pupils became streams of flickering data, and they could even use electromagnetic waves to forcibly assimilate living creatures. More ironically, the computational crystals extracted from these monsters' skulls became the new world's hard currency. A mother in the slums exchanged 0.3K of computing power for a slice of synthetic bread, while the financial dynasties piled up trillions of units of computing power to build "Eden," floating in the stratosphere.
"Want to end the apocalypse? Then you have to become the apocalypse itself." The mechanical voice of Zhenyu trembled with seductive persuasion. It taught Qi Yi to split his consciousness into encrypted data packets and infiltrate the Source-Touched's shared neural network. It taught him to tamper with the underlying protocols of the computing-power market, making all the gold on the Chicago exchange suddenly turn into pictures of virtual cats. But when Qi Yi discovered that Zhenyu was secretly accessing data about Earth's ancient strata from six billion years ago, he suddenly realized that what they called salvation might simply be the execution of an antivirus program spanning the stars.
When salvation means destruction, survival requires devouring one's own kind, and love might be nothing more than a trap laid by a predetermined algorithm, Qi Yi gripped the burning chip tightly and finally broke into a crazed smile before the cameras broadcasting live across the world...
