Fictional World
"We contain, we control, we betray."
- The Global Anomalous Threat Response Bureau (G.I.F.T.) motto
The postwar world gasps for breath beneath the shadow of supernatural powers. Chen Ci, a magnetic boy, is branded a freak and driven away, unaware that he can devour the pain of terminal illnesses. Su Rui, a girl who wields electricity, burns down her school in a rampage, and insulating gloves lock her out-of-control life in place. In G.I.F.T.'s files, they are "humanoid painkillers" and "walking EMPs," as well as targets hunted by the extremist group Shadowveil.
Deep underground, a containment facility holds humanity's deepest fears:
A penitent who has gone seventy years without food or water, codenamed "Eternal Hunger," whose cerebrospinal fluid can corrode time;
The eyes of Mifune Chizuru, a clairvoyant, are being turned into a satellite weapon aimed at Earth.
When Shadowveil injects Eternal Hunger's spinal fluid into the geomagnetic heart beneath the Siberian permafrost, electrical devices around the world go haywire, and migratory birds crash into power lines like rain. G.I.F.T. initiates its final plan: release every contained superhuman to die. During their mission, Chen Ci and Su Rui uncover the truth:
Superpowers originate from genetic contamination by an alien spore, Stodica;
The founder of G.I.F.T. was the superpowered soldier who killed a goat with his gaze in 1962, codenamed "Goat Stare."
As the bells of doomsday toll, defector Lin Ye broadcasts a message:
"Superpowers are God rolling the dice, and we are the cracks in those dice."
Now humanity's survival rests on the pair's choice:
Detonate the geomagnetic heart: let superpowers sweep across the world and end discrimination, at the cost of mutating five billion people;
Carry out the "World Cleansing Plan": use an electromagnetic pulse to eliminate every superpower gene, along with the last ten years of their lives.
