In the cyber age, everyone has implants, and every home is connected to a brain-computer interface.
Corporations use chips to control emotions, hospitals use algorithms to decide who lives and dies, and the poor have to pay on time even to dream.
Chen Ye had spent twenty-three years scraping by as a nobody, a back-alley repairman who fixed prosthetic eyes, welded prosthetic limbs, and replaced neural interfaces.
Then one night, he took a rush job repairing a brain-computer interface.
The client was dead.
He died on the repair table, his brain burned through the interface, yet his eyes were still moving.
Even stranger, the corpse stared at him in its final moments, repeating the same words:
“Don’t pull the plug… God is inside.”
Everyone said he’d suffered cyberpsychosis.
The corporation wanted to arrest him, the hospital wanted to lock him up, and the patrol officers believed he’d come into contact with an illegal neural module. They were about to send him to the “Serenity Center” for forced cleansing.
But from that night on, the world in his eyes changed completely.
The high-rises were crawling with grinning electronic talismans. Surveillance cameras were like living eyes. Charred passengers sat on the late-night subway. And buried beneath the ruins of the City God Temple was no statue, but an old-world master computer that was still beating like a heart.
He thought he was going mad.
Until a talisman he casually drew really did blast a ghost into the wall.
Until the broken idol on his altar, missing half its face, opened its eyes in the dead of night and said to him:
“Light the incense, young priest. There’s a job waiting.”
From then on, Chen Ye repaired implants by day and hunted electronic ghosts by night;
talismans in his left hand, a wrench in his right;
exorcising demons for the poor, performing rites for the rich, and, while he was at it, blowing up a few more of the heartless corporations that fed living people to their gods.
Everyone called him a cybernetic lunatic.
Only he knew the truth:
He really wasn’t.
He just knew a little about cultivating the Dao.
