New Tokyo, 2123. Humanity seeks immortality through mechanical augmentation and perfection through gene editing. Lin Wanxing, a “defective” with a partly mechanical heart, receives a final message ten years after her mother's mysterious death: “The Eden Project isn't salvation. It's extermination.”
To uncover the truth, she goes undercover in the underground black market, only to discover that she has long been on the “Gardener's” pruning list. While fleeing for her life, she is forced to work with another person on the list: Gu Linyuan, chief architect of the “Immortality Cloud” and one of the creators of this perfect world.
He falls from the clouds; she climbs up from the abyss. They meet in an iron jungle built on lies, moving from suspicion to interdependence, from using each other to trusting each other with their backs. When a mechanical heart collides with a flesh-and-blood body, and the thorny crown cuts into its wearer's hands, they discover that the fruit of Eden has been poisonous all along.
This is a war over what it means to be human: should we evolve into more efficient machines, or preserve our imperfect yet precious humanity? When love becomes the final line of code that cannot be programmed, can two broken souls rebuild human dignity and freedom amid the flood of data?
“The sharpest sword lies in the softest place; the most precious crown is forged from thorns.”
