In 2065, beneath the blood-red dome of the Magic City Biosphere, the consequences of genetic engineering had seeped into every inch of the land. Li Yixia's protective boots crushed their way over streets choked with crystal clusters. The scanner on her wrist shrilled: her younger sister, Li Yiqiu, whom she had searched for for seventeen years, had reached the lethal threshold, with her neural synchronization rate stuck at 79.3%. A former genetic engineer, Li Yixia knew that when the living vaccine completely failed, Li Yiqiu would become the final piece in the evolution of the Pandora Virus.
Twenty years ago, the “Moonlight Plague” tore human civilization apart. The virus leaked from their father Li Xinghua's laboratory turned infected people's bones into silicon-based matter and transformed them into quantum-state zombies. Those who resisted mutated into light-devouring beastfolk who hid by day and hunted by night. The black capsule Li Yixia carried was both the key to unlocking 100,000 frozen embryos in the underground river and the lethal switch that could set off the civilization filter.
Amid the ashes of the fallen Sky City, Li Yixia was forced to face the blood-soaked truth: her father's genetic lock system had already turned her and her sister into living sacrifices. The cloud-based consciousness archive of the new humans was being corrupted by the zombies' hive mind. Beastfolk shamans beat upon a machine for ancestral spirits, built from human skulls, in an attempt to crack the ultimate code for rebooting civilization. When a clone whose genes were 99.8% identical to hers surfaced beneath the Huangpu River, Li Yixia finally understood: this war had never been about survival. It was about deciding what kind of life deserved to be called “human.”
