The Ten Days to the End Prequel: The Cage Prologue

The bell of the Soul Management Bureau tolled dully through the void. For hundreds of years, departed souls had been sent like water through a stream into an experimental site codenamed “Peachland,” where gentle yet suffocating rules wore down their will. It was a breeding ground for the “God-Making Project” under the True God, as well as a vast prison that no one had noticed. At the time, Tianlong was the Bureau's most loyal enforcer. He had personally watched thirty batches of departed souls turn into walking corpses after being trapped in the same tedious tasks. When he was cleaning out the experimental site's “failures” for the third time, his fingertips touched a fragment of “echo” left behind by one soul. Hidden inside was a howl of utter despair, and it stirred a faint resonance in the divinity that had lain dormant within him for years. The discovery wound around his heart like a poisonous vine. He began secretly poring over the long-sealed experiment records. It turned out that the True God's so-called “god-making” project had been at a standstill for a century, like a frog slowly boiled in water. The souls deemed “failures” weren't without divinity. They simply lacked the key called “despair.” Once the seeds of doubt took root, they grew wildly into an ambition to overturn everything. Using his inspection privileges, he carved hidden runes into the core of Peachland and secretly altered the underlying logic of the game's rules. He also used “optimizing experimental data” as a pretext to approach Qinglong, a colleague who was just as dissatisfied with the Bureau. The two exchanged information in a dim control room, though each kept his own calculations behind his gaze. Tianlong wanted control of the rules, while Qinglong hoped to break free of the True God's shackles. This alliance of convenience had the seeds of betrayal in it from the very start. Meanwhile, Xu Liunian, a newly hired clerk, was pushing the roster of the last batch of departed souls through the labyrinthine corridors of the Bureau, lost