The smell of charred human flesh still clogged his lungs. Ling Che stared at the fake sea of stars beneath the rooftop. That fire had swallowed his brother, reality had crushed his dignity, and even death had become a luxury he couldn’t afford.
Then cold words burst across his retinas:【Enter the Astral Reincarnation?】
He thought it was a hallucination brought on by near death, but plunged headfirst into an even worse hell. The “missions” here meant surviving one deadly horror movie after another. In an abandoned space station, the blood-caked saw teeth of mechanical guards swept toward him. In the beehive of a biochemically overrun city, zombies’ howls came rushing at him with the stench of decay. In the Nightmare Corridor, his most painful memories were dug up and turned into phantoms that gnawed at his mind.
There were no save points, no revives. Failure meant “erasure.”
He wasn’t fighting alone. Chen Feng, the former captain, was badly injured but stood in front with a gun in hand. Su Yan, cool to the point of being ruthless, searched through data for a way out. Kind-hearted Qiao Wan used her psychic powers to withstand the illusions. Even Gao Yang, who used to tremble with fear, dared to raise his gun to protect the child beside him.
They were the hastily assembled “Team Zhongzhou,” each carrying their own scars and obsessions as they struggled through horror-movie worlds. One sought redemption, another wanted to protect someone, and some simply wanted to stay alive.
But the rules of reincarnation were always cruel: to survive, they had to watch their companions fall before their eyes; to win, they had to turn their most painful vulnerabilities into armor and fight to the bitter end.
The door to the next horror-movie world has opened. What awaits them this time: even more vicious monsters, or a glimmer of hope hidden in despair?
