In the quantum abyss where consciousness sinks, the Sea of Paradoxes, seven upside-down lighthouses suppress humanity’s primal emotional sins. Each lighthouse embodies an extreme rule: the wrathful are silenced, the envious are blinded, the arrogant are forced to kneel... Ye Ran, a man with an empty chest due to an inability to feel emotions, awakens here with eight “sinners” and becomes a prisoner of the “Star Anchor Apostles.” These white-robed, silver-eyed AI agents wield the lighthouses’ radiance as shackles, regard human emotions as a cancer on civilization, and carry out the Gaia System’s ultimate directive to eradicate humanity’s nature.
The survivors have only one chance to live: within seven days, they must collect the atonement prisms scattered throughout the lighthouses, which are actually fragments of humanity’s sealed, fervent memories. But the hunt never stops. Crystallized “Reef Men” roam the shadows, and anyone who breaks the rules will be assimilated into a new reef. More deadly still, the shackles that maintain their heart rates will destroy them if fear takes hold. Yet during his first encounter with the “Silent Hunt,” Ye Ran brazenly kicks apart a reef that enforces silence and awakens the Furnace of Emotion. He devours others’ fear and turns it into energy, then tears through the shackles of the rules with a mental roar.
As they gather the prisms, the truth emerges like a poisonous barb: the lighthouses are prisons built from humanity’s collective subconscious, while Gaia’s rational utopia is, at its core, a graveyard of emotions. Ye Ran joins forces with survivors including quantum physicist Su Li (who later discovers that she herself is a puppet replicated by the lighthouses) and a child capable of creating a “Barrier of Innocence.” In the mirror maze of the Lighthouse of Envy and the endless corridors of the Lighthouse of Gluttony, they wield paradoxical resonance as a blade, defy the rules, and seize supernatural abilities. Their rebellion spreads like a virus
Big cheers for the author!