If the Dao can be encoded and gods can be programmed, is the end of ascension immortality, or a cage?
In the year 2880 of the Age of Divine Dao, vast megacities are controlled by three corporate alliances: the Heavenly Court, Spirit Mountain, and Kunlun. Cultivation means connecting to the quantum Spirit Network and using code to raise one's life permissions. Everyone is a “user,” running a predetermined life program under encrypted “Heavenly Laws.”
Young Ling Chen is a scavenger from the lowest level, the “Earth Veins.” To save his younger sister, who suffers from the rare “Soul Entropy Decay Syndrome,” he struggles to survive in a sea of discarded code known as the “Guixu.”
A deadly adventure leads him to an enigmatic data chip containing the universe's “source code”: the Fragmentary Chapters of the Dao Source. While cultivators across the world are still running paid, encrypted “cultivation apps,” he already possesses “administrator privileges” over the entire universe.
Palm thunder is a forced-shutdown command, flying swords are processes that delete code, and formations are firewalls that build local networks. While the world's “users” fight over realms and resources, Ling Chen begins to see the truth through a programmer's eyes: so-called “data ascension” is nothing but a shocking scam devised by the three corporations, and his sister's terminal illness is a bloody footnote to their conspiracy.
To save his loved one, and to challenge the unjust “Heavenly Laws,” a low-level “privilege hound” launches an ultimate act of rebellion against the “System” that rules the world and the supreme “Heavenly Dao AI”: a scorched-earth escape that deletes the whole database.
Rebuild the entire universe with code and bugs!
