Passwords and Sacrifice

A Brief Introduction to Codes and Sacrifice

One rainy night during the plum-rain season in Deep Blue City, Zhou Zhengping, a leading authority on cryptography, is found dead in his locked laboratory. A bronze paperweight engraved with a Möbius strip, the emblem of his lab, is embedded in his chest. Stranger still, the keys left at the scene, an anonymous text message, and fresh scratches on the dead man's fingertips all point to a student who fell from a building ten years earlier in a case ruled an “accident.”

Cryptography expert Qiu Yingying is drawn into the case. She was Zhou Zhengping's student, the librarian who witnessed the fall ten years ago, and the key person who received the dead man's final voice message: “The bright light of dawn will, in the end, be consumed by darkness.” When Gu Mingchuan of the criminal investigation squad appears before her as a “suspect,” the sealed-away case and the mystery before them begin to intertwine. Zhou Zhengping's quantum computer conceals an ultimate algorithm promising “absolute security,” but at the cost of uploading and devouring living people's consciousness. Lin Zhao, who fell to her death ten years ago, is closely linked to the “faked death” of Su Yutong, Qiu Yingying's roommate. More shocking still, Su Yutong's younger sister, Su Nian, is trapped inside the quantum device that is about to “self-destruct”…

A locked-room cipher, the symbolism of the Möbius strip, and the ethical dilemma of brain-computer interfaces: as Qiu Yingying and Gu Mingchuan unravel clue after clue, they gradually uncover the bloody sacrifice behind “absolute security.” When an algorithm tries to become “the eye of God,” someone always has to become its tears.

This is a struggle over truth and redemption. Some weave their webs in the dark; others use courage as a blade to cut through the fog. And when the final truth comes to light, Qiu Yingying finally understands: more important than cracking a code