Socially Anxious Gaming Streamer & Criminal Investigation Captain
The king of the keyboard is the top suspect he’s hunting down.
The timid snail in real life is the neighbor he can’t help wanting to protect.
When criminal investigation captain Lu Lin is assigned to investigate a major money-laundering case involving the hit game Abyssal Mist, he assumes the target will be some cunning financial criminal. But the trail of the technical investigation points coldly to the apartment next door: Shen Qi, a pale, gloomy young neighbor who only appears late at night and seems to live in the shadows.
Online, Shen Qi is the gaming world’s renowned deduction genius, “Raven,” using his brilliant logic to control a deadly game of chess. Offline, though, he is so severely socially anxious that he can’t even meet someone’s eyes. Lu Lin approaches him with a mission and plenty of suspicion, but soon finds himself sinking into both the game world’s “Dead Fog Zone” and the real world’s “gentle cage.” He watches Shen Qi use the game’s “behavioral profile System” to reconstruct crimes flawlessly, and witnesses him tremble and weep at a single kind word.
Then an encrypted file links Shen Qi to a bizarre accident from three years ago, codenamed “Project Deep Sea.” When the game’s villain, “the Professor,” makes threats in the real world, and Lu Lin’s investigative report comes into direct conflict with the pounding of his heart, he has to make a choice: send this fragile genius into a cage of irrefutable evidence with his own hands, or trust his instincts and plunge alongside him into a deadly fog where reality and illusion intertwine, to uncover the true conspiracy looming over the “Abyss.”
The truth is always more brutal than the game, and trust is the ultimate wager, harder to put into play than any skill.
The writing is good.