I scrape by in the old district repairing secondhand brain-computer interfaces and illegally modifying cybernetics. Now and then, I use my ancestral yin-yang cybernetic eye to take care of dirty work for “the people upstairs.” They call it “guiding the dead,” but I call it under-the-table work.
Then, inside a memory chip cut from a severed finger, I scanned something that shouldn’t exist: a blood-red QR code that replicates itself, with the electronic signature of the previous Meng Po floating across it.
The underworld’s quantum Book of Life and Death glitched on the spot. Holographic projections of the Ten Yama Kings crowded into my thirty-square-meter repair shop, accusing me of losing the reincarnation system’s master access key.
Now the Judge’s soul-locking chains are after me, the Reincarnation Tech Group’s killer drones are cornering me, and the Meng Po AI that was supposed to have been formatted is using the retina of my left eye as a chat window to ask me late at night: “Do you know why every soul has to drink that bowl of soup?”
Because it’s not just humans who don’t want to be forgotten.
My cybernetics have begun dreaming of pixelated snow on the Bridge of Helplessness. When I charge them, I can smell the digital fragrance of the flowers of the Other Shore. And the latest intel says, if that old man who started up a mech at a jianbing stall wasn’t lying to me, the firewall around the Eighteen Levels of Hell was torn open last night.
Something escaped. It’s searching for my IP address.
Now I have to rewrite the underlying code of the Book of Life and Death in the cracks between neon and the netherworld. Either I become the biggest beneficial bug in the System, or I become the next redundant file to be permanently deleted.
