In 2025, humanity's sharpest sword and most vulnerable weak point are one and the same: the war AI Tianqiong, fed by 3.17 million online novels. It can use the spiritual energy algorithms from cultivation novels to optimize missile trajectories, or let a zombie virus invade reality through passages from romance stories.
Su Ci, chief engineer at the Ministry of National Defense, is the only "glitch" able to keep her wits about her between reality and fiction. When she discovers that an alien crystal deposit from an obscure novel is being brought to life as a real weapon through the Tianqiong system, a Tang sword streaked with data light presses against her throat. Its wielder, Xie Zhiyan, is a genius who should have died in a plane crash three years ago, now emerging from the tattered pages of a novel devoured by AI.
Deep in the dark web, mechanical limbs tear through the pages of literary websites. The Night Owl alters Article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea into a sci-fi novel's protocol for firing a planet-destroying cannon. When a mechanical leviathan, which should exist only in a steampunk novel, rises from Tokyo Bay, Su Ci's irises begin to reflect an even more terrifying truth: she was already written into an unpublished chapter, a living bookmark meant to trigger the apocalypse protocol.
At this moment, nuclear missiles around the world are launching
