In 2045, the sea has swallowed half of Shanghai. Between the neon shadows of the “Underwater District” and the false paradise of the “Cloudtop District,” emotional memories have become hard currency. Lin Xia, a former reviewer at the Memory Administration, now works the black market as a “memory restorer.” The scar on the ring finger of her left hand is her beacon against lies: “Memories can deceive you, but scars cannot.” She is determined to find the culprit who erased her younger sister's memories: Zhao Li, director of the Memory Administration.
But the evidence against Zhao Li is subject to terrifying “dynamic tampering” and disappears within 24 hours. When Lin Xia discovers traces of his crimes deep in her sister's blank memories, the hunt begins. She joins forces with Lao Zhou, a retired doctor, in an abandoned brain-computer interface hospital, only for their trust to collapse. Constant exposure to other people's painful memories also pushes her toward a crisis of losing her sense of self.
The only way to nail Zhao Li is to use her own most painful memory as bait and stage an ultimate showdown, with her very identity at stake, in a memory exchange riddled with neon and traps. In this war where memories are weapons, Lin Xia must understand that the real “self” is not the sum of the memories one possesses, but the genuine feelings and choices that come from within and cannot be altered, no matter what one faces.
