Dust of Negative Entropy

In 2077, the “spiritual qi revival” in the Tianyuan Federation is nothing more than a parasitic scam perpetrated by an alien civilization. The rich monopolize resources with loans against spiritual veins, while the poor mortgage their genes just to survive. And the so-called “cultivation” is merely the beginning of mutation by entropy-eroding viruses. Lin Shen is a gene hunter saddled with a debt of 300,000 spiritual vein coins. A rusted mechanical prosthesis is embedded in the left side of his face, and a cheap spiritual vein detector takes the place of his right eye. As the countdown on his mother’s cryogenic pod ticks on, he has 48 hours to hunt a high-level mutant beast. But on the brink of death, he awakens an “Inverse Entropy Spirit Root” that can devour other people’s spiritual veins. This power is both salvation and a death sentence: each time he uses it, another patch of petrified markings spreads across his body. His mysterious symbiotic partner, Su Li, has a Federation agent’s serial number hidden in her mechanical arm. The black-market doctor Wang Guizi has a prosthetic eye that turns out to be an experimental device left behind by Lin Shen’s father. And Chen Mo, the lofty director of the Spiritual Vein Administration, is using the “Universal Spiritual Vein Donation Plan” to conceal his scheme to turn the poor districts into “entropy-eroding farms.” When the “First-Generation Spiritual Vein Key” in his pocket watch glows red, and his mother’s “test subject number” comes to light, Lin Shen finally discovers that the so-called struggle to escape poverty is nothing but a game in which an alien civilization raises humanity like livestock. His Inverse Entropy Spirit Root is both a blade to break free of the cage and a power that demands blood sacrifice. This is a story about how the harder you struggle, the deeper you sink. When hard work has a price tag and life itself can be mortgaged, can we still preserve the last glimmer of humanity in a world of ever-increasing entropy?