The world was a precisely engineered System, until Shen Ji saw the first line of anomalous code.
He was a programmer in Suicheng. One late night, the “himself” in the elevator mirror smiled at him with an inhuman grin. He smashed the mirror and escaped, but from then on, he could sense the “anomalous entities” lurking throughout the city.
They weren’t ghosts. They were flaws in the rules. Each one was unique: the Mirror Shadow (E-01) loved to imitate, while E-02, the “Metal Prophet” parasitizing an engineer, was frantically dismantling the physical laws of the world.
The rule was simple: they couldn’t be deleted. They could only be sealed inside a living person or some kind of metal “Host.” The Host would be slowly eroded and overwritten.
With the Metal Prophet’s Host on the verge of collapse and a real-world catastrophe counting down, Shen Ji’s programmer instincts kicked in: create logs, reverse-engineer the problem, and search for flaws in the rules with his life on the line.
His investigation was like a deep scan. He discovered that anomalous events were spreading through the city’s networks at an exponential rate. Cognitive viruses, entities made of electrical-grid energy... This wasn’t a coincidence. It was a systematic infiltration targeting reality itself.
And he had to face the ultimate question: why was he the only one who could sense and interfere with the rules?
Everything he was fighting might be compiling him into the ultimate anomaly: the anomalous code itself.
