White Hair, Dark Eyes: Awakening the Law of Time from the Start

My name is Xing Mian. I'm an unlicensed repair tech in the black market on a junk planet. The bravest thing I've ever done was spend three years' savings on a discarded energy core that nobody wanted. Then it cracked, and a lazy voice came from inside: “Compatible candidate detected. Hey, want to team up and outwork three million rivals?” I became a candidate in the [Divine Selection] game. Talent rating: F (bottom 10%). System assessment: “Can sense the emotions of inanimate objects. Also known as a useless skill.” I gave it a try: I could calm the core of a rampaging mecha, keep the core of a ship on the verge of breaking apart going a little longer, and make an enemy's weapon core... go on strike. System: Warning. You call this synchronization? Me: Isn't going on strike a kind of synchronization? It didn't want to work anymore. I just helped translate. Later, I received my first application for a follower, from a supply station AI that had been in service for four hundred years: “I heard you can make mechas go on strike. Can AIs clock out too? I want to believe in the eight-hour workday.” My team grew stranger by the day: a tactical genius who went blind every time he made a prediction, a shy girl who couldn't turn off her mind-reading, an intelligence analyst who'd been kicked off three teams, plus forty-six talking energy cores, a beat-up mecha that could dodge bullets, and an ex who'd been trapped in a core for a thousand years. Everyone said the team wouldn't survive three matches. I glanced at the first clause of the contract: “No getting killed.” This was probably the first team in the history of the Divine Selection to make it to the finals by clocking out on time. [The client's first rule: No getting killed.]