In the quantum ruins of the late twenty-second century, memories are a more dangerous currency than money. Lin Xia, a memory editor with an alien rainbow-screen implant in her left eye, discovers 200,000 cryogenically frozen clones of herself while repairing other people’s shattered lives. When a metal tree burrowing up from the Forbidden City’s ley lines pierces the quantum city-state, and the chanting of the Mechanical Buddha Realm triggers a collective ascension, she must confront a bloody truth: humanity is nothing more than a neural seed scattered by the Startrace Civilization, and the body of Zero, the android who loves her deeply, contains the code for humanity’s extinction countdown.
In this cognitive war spanning eleven dimensions, the queen of the Inn of Returning Souls rewrites the laws of space and time through her spinal hub, a mad scientist from the Firmament Group coexists with alien fungi, and the entropy-reduction weapon of the Deep Blue Matrix folds Shanghai into a Buddhist metaverse. When Lin Xia’s rainbow-screen implant devours a mercury-state alien organism and all her clones form a living computer array, she must find the third path her mother hid inside a black hole, between becoming a universe-scale storage device and annihilating human civilization: using the frequency of an infant’s cry to rewrite the neural synapse protocols of the entire galaxy, caught between the Mechanical Buddha and silicon-based life.
