In 2056, two-thirds of humanity vanished overnight. Those who remained were thrown into the “Tribunal,” a logic-based screening mechanism created by a higher-dimensional being.
No skills, no shop, no System. Each exam room is a closed world with its own internally consistent logic. Candidates must find and correct the paradox at the world's core. Those who fail are erased completely, as if they had never been born.
Qin Wanyue, 29, is an interrogation expert with the provincial Public Security Department's major crimes unit.
Her case-solving rate is 100 percent, and she has never fired a gun. She relies on making suspects break down on their own. When she dies in an explosion, the Tribunal captures her consciousness and makes her a candidate.
She believes her greatest challenge is simply surviving until she clears the exam.
Until she discovers that the “native inhabitants” of the exam rooms are copies of real people, and the “candidates” around her may be examiners disguised as humans, known as “Face Cards.”
A deeper secret lies within the Queen of Hearts.
Legend has it that it is not a card, but a position. Anyone who clears three consecutive Hearts exam rooms through “the purest emotional logic,” without crossing the boundaries of human nature, will earn the right to become the Tribunal's “Emotional Calibrator,” judging all candidates through logic and humanity.
She meets the heartless King of Hearts, the obsessive Jack of Spades, the Queen of Diamonds trapped in time, and the Jack of Clubs who has forgotten himself.
And the final question she must face is this:
When the Tribunal seeks to format everything, what can you use to prove that humanity is an irreplaceable variable?
Remember: simply existing is proof.
