A Guide to Opening a Memory Black Market

Everyday trades in the “memory black market” + a mystery surrounding the tampering of collective history

From suspicion and exploitation to trusting one another with their backs, they rebuild genuine bonds amid false memories. They wield their scars as blades, fighting to reclaim the right to remember for everyone whose memories have been stolen.

Top-tier memory tailor Lin Yin has only three rules: ask no questions about the past, feel no empathy, leave no trace.

He sells snippets of memory to pay for his sister's life-saving treatment, until an ordinary job brings him into contact with the forbidden “orange sky” buried in a client's mind. That very night, the client is “made to look like a suicide,” and the city's memory-cleaning squads begin hunting him down.

With nowhere left to turn, Lu Qingyan storms into his safe house, knife in hand.

Her first question is: “Was there an orange sky in his memories?”

She brings an even more devastating truth: twenty years ago, they were both orphaned test subjects in a “memory experiment.” Now, the children from that experiment are being systematically erased.

He coolly weaves lies; she burns with the need to hunt down the truth.

They form an alliance to survive, but deep in each other's memories, they glimpse reflections of the other's childhood:

The missing year of Lin Yin's life, when he was seven, is where her recurring nightmare began.

The mastermind she has sworn to track down is linked to clues buried deep in his altered mind.

As the memories of the entire city begin to fall into collective disarray, an unseen hand is rewriting everyone's past.

They must entrust each other with their deepest wounds to fight this silent extermination.

But trust is more fragile than memory, especially when Lin Yin finally realizes that to end it all, he must let her cut open his last and most painful memory with her own hands...