Mountains and Seas: Xirang's Dream, Gun's Birth

In the spring of 2035, floods struck both the metaverse game Fantasy of Mountains and Seas and the real world: a data flood and a climate flood.

Chen Yu, a young engineer whose credit rating has been wiped clean, becomes a “zero-score human” in reality. But in the game’s Great Wilderness, at Yuyuan, he finds a “broken piece of Xirang” flagged by the System as a BUG. Asleep within it is Gun, a failure from five thousand years ago, executed for stealing earth to control the floods: an “ill-omened father.”

When Gun’s remains resonate with Chen Yu’s broken bones, the virtual flood begins reflecting the rain streaks of reality, and the deleted memories of failures quietly take root amid the digital ruins.

Chen Yu, Su He, a digital anthropologist, “Observer 07,” an enforcer for the System, “Yu,” a data-born child conceived from the thoughts of countless people, and an eternally laid-back capybara are drawn into a “soul-summoning” that spans five thousand years.

They build levees for the “useless people” erased by the System, raise monuments to the “names of failures” wiped from history, and summon dreams for the “silent hearts” crushed beneath the worship of efficiency.