Shanghai Superconductivity Center, 2120. A quantum entanglement lasting 0.7 femtoseconds tears apart the stable state. Billions of streams of data coalesce into the outline of dragon scales, and the coffee stain on Lin Yumian's lab coat transforms into the glowing oracle-bone character for "dragon."
At the final moment before the Quantum Buddha Grotto collapses, the Dragon Sovereign uses his own reverse scales as a key and hurls the souls of the nine dragon sons into the human world. Qiuniu falls into a superconductivity lab; Pulao is trapped by the fear of aging in the financial world; Suanni takes up residence in a body with ALS; Chaofeng latches onto an astronaut's obsession with the stars... Only by tempering their souls through the Eight Sufferings can they obtain the dragon essence. The calamity yet to come, Chiwen, hides in a loophole of cause and effect; Jiaotu seals his genes inside a black hole. The anchors of the dragon clan's reincarnation are scattered throughout every fold of human longing for what cannot be attained.
When Lin Yumian presses her palm against a liquid nitrogen tank at minus 196 degrees Celsius, the searing pain of the dragon essence awakening tears open her memories. The tailbone birthmark removed when she was seven sprouts blood-red dragon scales; the code to The Guide to Returning to the Ruins is hidden in her father's liver cancer cells; every time Shanghai's power grid flickers, another dragon vertebra rises along her spine.
The bronze bell in the graveyard of memories; the karmic fire lotus in the Luosang Buddha Grotto; the mirrored prison corridor in the Moon's Mare Tranquillitatis; the inscriptions on the monument of cause and effect beneath the Songjiang River... The paths of the nine sons through their tribulations were long ago etched into the DNA of human civilization by dark matter strings.
When the final dragon-scale rubbing is printed on quantum paper, the truth behind the Dragon Sovereign's scheme is revealed: the so-called truth of the Nine Sufferings was never the dragon clan's path back to the ruins, but a covenant of coexistence through which human and dragon civilizations could shatter fate.
Now Shanghai's power grid is flickering for the ninth time. The dragon-scale shadow reflected on your phone screen may be the first glimmer of a dragon son's awakening.
