In 2025, an explosion at a quantum laboratory hurls military scientist Lu Chen into the vortex of Hong Kong’s criminal underworld in 1985. Carrying a titanium-alloy tactical pen capable of piercing bulletproof glass, he is forced to be reborn as a Hongxing enforcer amid the bloodshed of Kowloon Walled City. Then he discovers that every gangland battle he takes part in eerily matches the “Secret History of the Triads,” sealed in an archive forty years in the future.
When a butterfly knife punctures the eardrum of an East Star red pole, and ashes from account books burned on a stormy night drift toward a Royal Navy warship stationed in Hong Kong, Lu Chen gradually realizes that his transmigration is itself part of a closed-loop conspiracy. The bullet scar on Chan Ho-nam’s neck matches an 1983 border police shooting record; the golden lighter Kwun plays with bears the family crest of the future owner of a Macau casino; and the bloodstained tactical pen is the missing component that triggered the laboratory explosion.
Amid the historical tides of the Asian financial crisis and Hong Kong’s return to China, Lu Chen navigates the rules of the underworld and the technology of the future, trying to change the fate destined to be entered into the ICAC archives. Standing atop the convention center on June 30, 1997, with his sniper scope reflecting the moment the five-star red flag replaces the Union Jack, he finally realizes that the “dark law of order” upheld for forty years was merely a sandbox simulation by a higher-dimensional civilization.
