The Black Tortoise Pact

In 2077, the brain-computer interface giant Tianshu Group uses the virtual world Taixu Realm as a prison, trapping human consciousness in a cyber-cultivation killing ground. Former special forces soldier Lin Yuan is forced to become the 77th Xuanwu experimental subject, a ghost straddling reality and data. In the real world, an obsidian crystal is consuming his right arm. In the virtual world, he is the only quantum existence bearing the dual markers of "Abnormal NPC Data" and "Player Night Watchman." When the Heaven-Mending Bureau's purge protocol launches, he discovers that his neural synapses can devour GM privileges. Meanwhile, on the laboratory's surveillance screens, a figure wearing a bronze beast mask is pushing his synchronization rate toward the limit...

The "quantum ghost" Su Li is the living key to this conspiracy. Her consciousness is a remnant of a brain-death accident three years ago. After Chu Jianghan implanted her in the Vermilion Bird Core, she became an immortal data physician. Every time she casts a healing spell, she trades fragments of her memories for another person's chance at life, until she meets Lin Yuan. The instant they touch, the quantum entanglement of the Xuanwu and Vermilion Bird covenants tears through Taixu Realm's underlying code. A bronze coffin in the Sword Mound's abyss, the Gate of Guixu on the moon's far side, and the reality-consuming "Data-Burning City" appear one after another.

In this desperate gamble for the survival of civilization, every 1% of damage Lin Yuan absorbs leaves another crystalline fissure in Su Li's brain tissue. And every time Su Li unlocks a fragment of tampered laboratory memories, Lin Yuan's pupils take on another glint of mechanical coldness. When the countdown to heat death reaches zero at the hour of the Dragon on Sunday, they must choose: ignite the Vermilion Bird Core and burn away Tianshu's quantum tyranny, or bear the Xuanwu Protocol in the flesh and become the living gravestone of a new world?