In Yungang City in 2047, neon and mildew coexist in the steel forest. The memory chips of the Dome Group can sell the tremors of first love and erase the fear of death, but it has spawned a black market for selling painful memories in the slums - the last seconds of dizziness of people who jumped from buildings, the midnight groans of cancer wards, and the AI souls trapped in holographic cheongsams are circulated here.
Lin Jin, a 24-year-old electronic waste dump hunter, is gifted with the ability to smell the bloody smell of memory data. When she glimpsed the last words of top scientist Shen Duo after falling into the sea from the blood-stained chip, a binary code like a Buddhist scripture suddenly emerged from the old burns on her left arm. In order to unravel the mystery of her life experience, she had to use her homemade prosthetic eyes to analyze the Kunqu Opera code on the memory black market, only to discover that she was just an AI container synthesized by Shen Duo using his deceased wife's brain waves, and that millions of residents in Yungang City were quietly turning into clones carrying the same memory.
In this war intertwined with the torrent of data and bronze totems, Lin Jin must make a choice: allow the Dome Group to rewrite humanity into a painless blank body, or implant himself as a virus into the city's power grid, forever wandering in the neon abyss in the form of an electronic ghost. When the boundary between reality and fiction collapses, is destroying the system liberation, or another form of collective suicide?
In the cyber arena, black market brokers in long robes sell fragments of consciousness of the singers of the Republic of China, and the tears of the mechanical Buddha turn into data rain and corrode the blue bricks of Shikumen. And there is always an unsolved mystery in the old-fashioned USB flash drive around Lin Jin's neck - if Ai is just a preset program, why did her rusty mechanical heart break when she heard Shen Duo reenacting his wife's fall from the building for the thousandth time in the memory cemetery?
