The Age of Scorching Lies

“When body temperature becomes a fatal weakness, a lie is the most heartfelt confession.”

Xia Lingyin, the “deceased” heiress of the Nangong Consortium, dons the disguise of a poor girl from the slums and enters St. John’s Academy, wearing a medical neck ring capable of scorching lies away. Her goal was to reclaim her family’s lost genetic key, but she crosses paths with Gu Xizhou, heir to the Gu family: a perfect weapon who can detect lies with a temperature-sensitive metal card.

A battle of wits at an auction, and a ginkgo leaf falling from a Ming-dynasty rosewood pen rest, expose the shocking lie behind a shipwreck twenty years ago.

On a stormy night at the observatory, overlapping palm lines awaken a genetic database and rip open the ethical wound of a cloning experiment.

As champagne rains down beneath a falling chandelier, she cuts into the back of his neck to remove an explosive chip, while he bites through her neck ring to inject an antidote serum.

Only then do they realize that their supposed enemy is none other than a “mirror-image test subject” bred in their fathers’ test tubes.

“We are viruses coded with hatred, yet we dream of becoming each other’s System patches.”

In this secret romance, played out on a board of wealthy families with genes as the stakes:

- With every 0.5°C rise in body temperature, a lie edges closer to the truth.

- The melody of the Moonlight Sonata conceals the coordinates of evidence meant to be erased.

- The medical neck ring’s alarm signals both a racing heart and a countdown to death.

As the century-old gears of the clock tower collapse into a matrix of code, “September 23, 1997” begins flashing inside the cloning pod.

But the cruelest truth is this:

Love is the primordial virus written into our genetic code, and you and I willingly surrender to it.