Yuan is an ordinary student at East Sea University who gets by on part-time jobs. Besides being poor, he has a secret he can't tell anyone: he can "see" the underlying data of all things. Every person, every tree, every star appears to him as lines of cosmic code that can be read and rewritten.
He awakened at twelve. At eighteen, while saving a stray cat on the verge of death, he activated his "Analysis Cortex" for the first time. From then on, an indelible golden pattern was branded on his left palm. It is proof of the hyper-analysis ability he gained by burning his own neurons, and a countdown clock for his life.
One day, the campus belle Jiang Ruoxue comes to him, asking him to calculate how long her mother has left to live. In her mother's cancer cells, Lin Yuan discovers an "exogenous sequence" that should not exist in human genes: a "back door" implanted in human bloodlines by a mysterious being from beyond the stars known as the "Designer."
This leads him to a truth hidden for 13.8 billion years: humanity on Earth is merely an experimental subject in the universe, designated TLE-001-AT7, the seventh species in the test group. The previous six groups have all gone extinct. The Designer will return in thirty years. If humanity is judged unfit, the entire human race will be erased from the cosmic database, leaving no trace, not even in history.
