City of Ashen Memories
In an apocalypse shrouded in gray fog, “forgetting” is deadlier than the walking corpses. Those whose memories are devoured by the virus become mindless “Hollow Ones.” Only by clinging to old objects that hold their memories can they preserve a shred of humanity amid the ruins.
Chen Mo’s sole obsession is a notebook filled with his wife Su Wan’s name. But when the intelligent corpse “Night Owl” tears apart their stronghold and steals the notebook, even his memory of why he is searching for Su Wan begins to blur. During his escape, he awakens the ability to “resonate with memories,” allowing him to read the fragments left behind in the Hollow Ones. Yet, following the clues, he discovers that Su Wan was among the virus’s first researchers, and is also a mysterious being who controls the corpses, known as the “Mother’s Emissary.”
From the fall of the Lightpick Stronghold to the memory trade in Black Crow City, and then the battle of wills deep within the research institute, Chen Mo presses onward with the companions he has left. He must fight the memory-devouring fog and corpses that hunt their own kind, while also confronting the most cruel truth, torn between “finding his beloved” and “saving the world”: Su Wan injected herself with the mutated virus partly to suppress its Mother, and partly to protect the core memories of him that she could not bear to lose.
When memory becomes a weapon and forgetting turns into an abyss, this apocalyptic redemption, forged with “memory” as its blade, will finally reveal, once the gray fog has lifted, how humanity and love can be reborn from the ashes.
