At three in the morning, the club night has just ended. Lin Ye, the “spirited girl” who reigns supreme in online trash talk, is the top-tier star of the post-2000s workplace-reform movement and the short-video scene’s delightfully tacky dance-music crowd. She’s filming a farewell group dance beneath a bridge with her “colorful spirited-girl squad.”
The next second, a System appears: [Mad Beauty Makeover Plan]. With one click, it bundles up all ninety-nine of her girls, along with Lin Ye herself, and drops them into 1930s “Shanghai, the Paris of the East.” It’s the nineteenth year of the Republic, in the old French Concession: gangs abound, foreign powers carve up the city, and the Axe Gang, Green Gang, Hongmen, Triads, foreign trading houses, and warlords put on a real-life battle royale every day.
At the Huangpu River docks, she opens her eyes to a hail of bullets.
