Imagination Unleashed

While buying oden at a convenience store, ordinary young man Lin Shen discovers that the world has become a pixelated survival game called “Blue Star Online.” As scenes from reality increasingly overlap with the data of creatures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Egyptian pyramids, Greek temples, and other civilizations, the “shutdown countdown” on his wrist begins ticking down. Only then does he realize that human civilization is nothing more than a quantum experiment staged by extraterrestrial observers, and that the so-called apocalypse is actually a countdown to the awakening of the Void Lord, who devours data.

On the brink of the pixelated world's collapse, Lin Shen and A-Ling, an awakened NPC guide, travel through civilization instances such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas data pool, the pyramid data chamber, and the data storm of Olympus. They trade memories for the skills of mythical beasts and use emotional resonance to unravel data paradoxes. From tampering with the logic of the Sphinx's riddle to rewriting the Mayan Long Count calendar's doomsday prophecy, he gathers source-code fragments in the gap between data streams and reality, gradually uncovering the truth that the Observers are the true players in a much bigger game. The Void Lord, it turns out, is the collective resentment of all the civilizations that have been formatted.