An Attack from the Future

In 2085, a blue rift that split the sky appeared over Beijing. Quantum physicist Cheng Yan discovered that it contained a catastrophic spacetime anomaly, while a classified implant buried in the arm of national security adviser Lin Yuqing began transmitting a warning from the year 2235: this was the beginning of a war.

The truth was horrifying: the attackers, known as “Time Purifiers,” were mechanized humans from a post-apocalyptic future, intent on erasing twenty-first-century civilization to reverse the universe’s heat death. The remnants of the Human Alliance, meanwhile, were trying to rewrite history to save themselves. The two sides fought to the death across three battlefields: reality, with an upside-down steel lotus in Antarctica; time, with the White House in a four-dimensional maze; and consciousness, centered on the quantum core Monroe.

Cheng Yan and Lin Yuqing were forced into the maelstrom. Lin Yuqing’s quantum implant was the key to controlling the laws of time, while Cheng Yan’s brain waves were the spark needed to activate the crucial “Monroe Protocol.” Their deadly link, forged by quantum entanglement, gave them the power to overturn the laws of physics, but also caused their bodies to grow transparent and gradually come apart. Cheng Kong, a Watcher who claimed to be their son and came from multiple timelines, revealed the brutal cycle of human civilization on the Möbius loop of time.

Faced with the ultimate paradox of “destroying the past to save the future,” Cheng Yan and Lin Yuqing must choose: surrender to an inevitable cycle of destruction, or wager their very existence and use emotional resonance as a bowstring to tear a new branch into the closed loop of time, winning civilization a chance at life that does not yet exist? The price may be becoming ghostly observers, wandering the folds of time for eternity.

“Time is not a straight line, but a Möbius loop. Every ending is a beginning that has yet to be written.”