The Bones of Dreammaking

In Newjing City, rain is the eternal soundtrack, and memories are currency.

Ling Su is a “memory painter.” His brush doesn’t use paint, but neural code capable of rewriting the past. He slips into the depths of his clients’ fractured minds, covering bloodied scars with fabricated warmth in exchange for a fee that can numb him. He is highly skilled at his craft, and utterly indifferent to it. He believes happiness is a technology one can choose, while the truth is worthless.

Then, during an ordinary job, he finds a “ghost fragment” that belongs to no one in the depths of a powerful man’s memories: a girl crying out amid flames, and an insignia he has never seen before that nevertheless pierces him with pain.

Like a virus, the fragment instantly awakens blank areas in Ling Su’s own mind, buried beneath layer upon layer of memories. Former clients begin dying under mysterious circumstances, while unseen pursuers emerge from the city’s shadows. The very technique that has sustained his life is dragging him into an abyss built on lies.

To survive, and to find the girl, Ling Su is forced onto a path from which there is no turning back. He will stand against a memory archaeologist who believes that “truth comes first,” against the megacorporation that controls the lifeblood of the entire city’s memories, and finally, against the “self” he buried with his own hands.

When everything forgotten comes surging back, will he embrace the cruel truth, or sink into a perfect lie?