Between Two Thoughts

"Every cage was once a refuge. Every ruin waits to be rebuilt."

In 2026, structural engineer Liu Nian takes on the old-city redevelopment project "Guiqifang." He hopes to restore order with steel and concrete amid the ruins of his childhood home, but in doing so, he cracks open the frozen abyss of memories buried within him for twenty years.

At the age of four, he was Sample 003-7 in the "Special Observation Project" at the Red Star Welfare Institute. Cages, scissors, yellow cylindrical toys... The project leader, codenamed "Cartographer," used the cold language of "science" to implant symbols of fear into his mind, recording every breakdown and distortion. The project came to an abrupt end, its crimes buried underground. Only Liu Nian remained, living among the crowds like an island, a precise yet disintegrating "structure" with a mind full of cages.

Now warning letters, blood-red graffiti, and ghostlike surveillance close in one after another. The Cartographer never went away. Watching from the shadows as if admiring his finest work, he observes Liu Nian's every shudder and every attempt to "reconstruct" himself. He even takes an eager part in this deadly game, played on the board of the human mind.

Shen Mu, a cold and detached psychiatrist, is Liu Nian's last anchor. He uses the scalpel of reason to dissect trauma, only to discover that he, too, has become a pawn in the game. Su Xiaoman, a young hacker, tracks the ghost's trail through the depths of cyberspace, only to uncover the tip of an iceberg: a multinational human experimentation program from the Cold War. And Lin Xiaoxi, the neighbor in a wheelchair, offers the clumsiest but kindest goodwill, becoming a fragile thread between Liu Nian and the world of "normal people," one that could snap at any moment.

This is not simply a hunt for a killer. This is a game spanning time and