A century after the sun went out, humanity huddles around geothermal fires to survive. Qin Jin, once an abandoned stand-in, accidentally activates a twin System while digging for fireworms in the ice. The holy [Kindling] calls on him to save the world, while the deranged [Oathbreaker] tempts him to destroy it.
Desperate for food, he leads his team in an assault on a frozen granary, where they encounter Bone-Eaters capable of tearing through armor and Cao Man, a tribal chieftain who believes in the law of the jungle. When the Kindling System issues a quest to “save a child,” and the Oathbreaker System flashes the blood-red words “kill the chieftain,” Qin Jin grins as he springs his trap. “I’ll take both.”
A seed vault of an ancient civilization deep inside the granary reveals the truth: humanity once deliberately extinguished the sun. The broodmother brand on the tribal saintess points to radiation experiments as the source of supernatural awakenings. And the opposing Systems within Qin Jin are the good and evil personalities split from the AI of the “Kindling Project.”
With one hand, he builds a shelter for refugees; with the other, he wields a blade to wipe out his enemies, walking a tightrope between order and chaos. When Liu Huaishan, a profiteering wanderer, monopolizes daylight gold and sparks a currency war, and the apocalyptic blood feast foretold by the prophet Zhou Tong arrives, Qin Jin turns the tables and massacres the rebels, only to find a Kindling insignia engraved with his childhood number at the bottom of a celebratory wine bottle.
To end the eternal night, he ventures deep into a nest of mutants to seize the broodmother’s core, where he faces the remorseful consciousness of a scientist: “We thought creating a geothermal spring could replace the sun, but we unleashed a demon from the heart of the earth.” At last, standing before the artificial sun reactor, Qin Jin faces the ultimate choice: ignite the spark of civilization at the cost of his own life, or let humanity remain in darkness forever?
In the eternal night, the only light is the embers of a betrayer.
