Zone Nine: My Mechanically Ascended Girlfriend

Welcome to Zhulong City:

The skies belong to hovercars and holographic idols. The ground belongs to garbage, gangs, and the forgotten.

Lin Qi is a scavenger scraping by in a steel graveyard. His greatest ambition in life is to save up 300 credits for a bottle of coolant for his neural interface. Then he accidentally intercepts a coded signal from a forbidden zone in the “Great Collapse.”

The signal points to Abandoned Mine No. 7, to an experimental subject erased from history, and to a hidden door in his own brain that he never knew existed.

For the first time, the boy who would risk his life for fifty credits wants to risk it for an “answer.”

But the abyss never extends credit:

Every step forward costs blood, memories, and the only thing he believes in: his own “self.”

When all the city lights go out and the communications channel holds only his heartbeat, woven together with an “incoming call” on the same frequency, Lin Qi finally understands:

The scavenger hasn’t found treasure, but a receipt from the abyss.

And the person at the other end of the line may not be a savior:

It may be another version of him, just beginning to awaken.