Beneath the rusted iron dome of the Lower City, Lu Cheng has only two choices: watch his mother die slowly from tuberculosis, or risk his life in the Outlands, where mutated beasts roam.
The spot that should have earned him a place in the Upper City is taken by an official's son. He can't afford the psionic medicine that could save his mother, and even when he tries to join a Pathfinder squad just to earn a living, Zhao Kun sneers, "A Lower City loser like you thinks you're fit to use psionic power?"
Then, gripping the old jade pendant his father left him, he unexpectedly awakens to its power in a desperate moment at the mining site. This battered pendant is actually a key capable of activating the psionic core!
When the purge squad storms in with their mechs, the green light from the pendant shatters their aircraft. When Zhao Kun tries to seize the mine's secret treasure, Lu Cheng sees through the psionic trap with the pendant and turns the tables on him. Even more terrifying, the powerful Kael family of the Upper City is searching the whole city for the "holder of the psionic key."
Before falling unconscious, his mother finally reveals the truth: "Your father wasn't a mechanic. He was a researcher who fled the Kael family..."
In the underground laboratory of an abandoned research facility in the eastern suburbs, the metal door lights up in response to the pendant. The secret his father hid for eighteen years is about to be revealed.
But the moment the door opens, Lu Cheng turns cold all over. There's no sign of his father inside, only a line of blood-red writing: "They don't want the core. They want you."
Where is his father? What family secret does the pendant hold? And why must he be the one to end the hatred between the Lower City and the Upper City?
