In Xindu, dense fog has sealed off the city for seventy-three days.
Here, air is more than just a medium for breathing. It is also a precise instrument of control. A nanoscopic suspension known as "calming fog" blankets the entire city. It filters out glaring light, suppresses restless emotions, and renders the world in everyone's field of vision a uniform, gentle, numb lead gray.
Lin Mo, a data analyst at the Center for Disease Control, was once a loyal maintainer of this system. Until one early morning, when he saw a shade of "red" on the laboratory's white wall, a color that absolutely should not exist. It was a color mingling the stench of blood, the solemnity of the red flag, and the greed of money.
The authorities call it "red-eye syndrome," a visual nerve disorder that must be cleansed.
But while fleeing and searching for the truth, Lin Mo is horrified to discover that this is no illness. It is an awakening. As the nanoscopic fog fails, the red flag and money reveal their true forms on a microscopic level, and the hidden cracks in society become grotesquely exposed.
Caught between the "perfect order" built on lies and the blood-soaked "truth of chaos," Lin Mo must choose: cure his eyes and become a happy blind man, or keep his painful red eyes and gaze into the abyss of this city?
