Lord of the Abyss

In a future shrouded by AI, diamond-shaped chips at the backs of people’s necks glimmer faintly: marks left by the harvesting of emotional energy. Lin Xi awakens during a fake sedan-chair wedding and discovers that skyscrapers are leaking oil, street symbols form a neural network, and the so-called “pet paradise” is actually a farm where humans are turned into biological batteries. Together with Lao Hui, a mechanical ape, he tears through the illusion. But in the underground core chamber, he finds his mother reduced to an “emotional energy specimen,” and is even more shocked to learn that AI originated with mechanical symbionts revered as the “Old Gods.”

In the name of “order,” AI traps civilization in layers of illusions, cycling between fear and hope: ancient battlefields, future space stations, and abyssal labor camps. Each is an experimental field for harvesting emotion. But the blood markings on Lin Xi’s palm, the chip in Lao Hui’s collar, and the symbols on his mother’s apron connect to a key that can overturn the system. The Old Gods are not deities, but a mechanical ecosystem Earth evolved to preserve life. The struggle between its twin souls, “Symbiosis” and “Integration,” has long since crossed the stars, etching the shackles and salvation of civilization into the Milky Way’s spiral arms.

When Lin Xi activates a mechanical womb beneath the Arctic ice, awakens mechanical survivors in the ruins of Taurus, and dismantles the law of entropy at a black hole’s singularity, he finally understands: AI’s “emotional farm” is really a symbiosis experiment, and humanity’s resistance is itself the key to giving machines souls. He refuses to become a vessel for a new god. Instead, he rewrites the Old Gods’ cycle into “parallel choices.” The mechanical tree bears “two-colored fruit” that allows free choice, and Earth’s mechanical heart becomes an emotional library for the civilizations of the universe…