When you discover that your memories are fabricated, that the genes of an unknown creature flow through your body, and that the countdown on your wristwatch ends not in death but in a more brutal truth, welcome to the hunting ground of the “System.”
Lu Chen, a surgeon, and Jiang Han, a mercenary, are two elite professionals with nothing in common. A bloodstained black card drags them into the abyss of a nightmare. A corpse with Lu Chen’s own face lies in a morgue refrigerator. A bronze coffin beneath a Republic-era bridal sedan bears a genetic helix. On a deep-sea cruise ship, an indescribable entity murmurs their identification numbers… Every scenario conceals terrifying laws that overturn everything they know:
■ In the mutated hospital, folded space turns the emergency building into a maze of flesh, while the rules on the nurses’ duty roster devour the organs of those who follow them;
■ At the ghost school, academic credits equal lifespan, and staring directly at an administrator wearing a red armband causes quartz crystals to grow on your retinas;
■ On the abyssal cruise ship, enjoying the captain’s banquet means exchanging organs with yourself from a parallel universe, while the tentacles of a sleeping ancient god cling to the ship’s hull.
Lu Chen’s scalpel can cut through rifts in space-time, and Jiang Han’s pupils can predict the paths of death. But the most terrifying thing isn’t the monsters: it’s the mark the System has etched into their genes. Lu Chen discovers that the thirty minutes of memory he loses after each mission are being used to refine the neural network of a superorganism. Meanwhile, dragon-scale patterns begin to appear on Jiang Han’s skin. The marks they once thought were birthmarks are actually genetic modification codes from the embryonic stage: X-07 and X-11.
A yellowed photograph from an experiment. Seven black-clad figures standing in front of a biosafety cabinet. Two bodies suspended in liquid
