In 2189, humans encoded "spiritual energy" into data, built a global "spiritual network", and formed a "cyber immortality" system: prosthetics correspond to spiritual roots, AI replaces exercises, and the Yuan Universe turns into a secret realm. "Transcending the tribulation" means breaking through the spiritual network firewall, and "ascension" means breaking into the Tiandao server.
Lin Ye is a discarded defective product of the "Spiritual Root Transformation Project". The damaged chip in his left brain causes him to be tortured by electricity leakage all day long. He becomes a "leakage ghost" who can be bullied by everyone in the abandoned city of New Shanghai. He also has to evade the recycling team that specializes in catching those with broken roots. Until a life-or-death escape, his neuroprosthetic brain accidentally connected to the old spiritual network node and parsed out the incomplete technique "Data Flow Heart Sutra" - it can convert abandoned monitoring data, old programs and other free data into "pseudo spiritual energy", and create defective "code techniques".
From then on, he relied on transforming his prosthetic body to survive tribulations, used codes to crack secret realms, fought his way to Tianyan Academy from the bottom of the abandoned city, fought against the Iron Feather Sect that monopolized psychic powers, and exposed the conspiracy of the "Old God" (the out-of-control Spirit Network AI) to revive. In the end, this defective product that was judged "unworthy of cultivating immortals" used human emotions as a blade and codes as a shield to reconstruct the order of the spiritual network and became a "cyber immortal" connecting reality and the spiritual network. The interstellar civilization of cultivating immortals is following the signal of the spiritual network...
