In New Harbor City, where neon lights have turned cancerous, neural tendrils from the Heavenly Brain Group dangle from the sky, harvesting human suffering. Jiang Mou crouches in the basement of the Kangyuan Prosthetics Clinic, scrubbing dried blood from an operating table with a rusty steel brush. Three years ago, a neural interface operation left him deaf and mute. It was a means for the corporate giant to silence his hacker father. When his retinal scanner picks up blue lines of code moving across Qingxi’s gums, he suddenly scrapes the skin off his own index finger with the brush.
