A Midsummer Promise in the Maze of Memory

On a stormy summer night, illustrator Lin Xiaoman discovers strange gaps in her memory: her phone contains an unfamiliar apartment passcode, her wallet is stuffed with shopping receipts that aren’t hers, and even her social media has a mysterious contact saved as “The Universe’s Sweetest.” When she follows the clues to the apartment, she finds programmer Jiang Yi staring blankly at a wall of surveillance screens. Playing on them in a loop are “everyday” scenes she has never experienced. Forced to become “memory roommates,” the two begin exposing the holes in each other’s memories and gradually discover that Starsea City is home to a group of “prisoners of time” whose memories have been altered. Supermarket price tags change in the blink of an eye, subway announcements are forever stuck on routes from three years ago, and even the owner of the milk tea shop downstairs can name the drinks they ordered “yesterday.” As they piece together more fragments of memory, they realize this mystery may be linked to a bizarre laboratory explosion three years earlier, and that their seemingly accidental meeting was code written by fate long ago. As their false everyday world begins to collapse, the fantastical creatures Lin Xiaoman draws come to life one after another, while the programs Jiang Yi writes unexpectedly breach the wall between reality and memory. Can these two souls abandoned by time find each other again in a collapsing world?