My name is Chen Yu, and my life motto is: If I lie flat enough, the rat race can never catch me.
Then I picked up a broken mirror shard at a secondhand market, and that very night, I saw a ghost. Literally. Even more absurdly, I was kidnapped by a notice bearing a panda’s face and dragged to a bizarre place called Ling Shu Academy.
The people here call spiritual energy “fundamental particles” and treat talismans like program code. My new teammates include an internet-addicted girl who treats reality like a video game, a socially anxious architect who draws wards in CAD, and a former researcher with OCD who insists that everything can be put in Excel.
We’re the Academy’s officially recognized “good-for-nothing squad.”
They want me to learn how to slay demons and maintain the balance of the world. But when I look through the mirror shard, all I see are bugs and loopholes in the world’s rules.
Now the entire school calls me a walking natural disaster and avoids me at all costs. Only I know that whenever I wake from a midnight dream, a voice always whispers in my mind:
“The world is a program on the verge of collapse, and you are its only patch.”
