After the Great Rift, human civilization collapsed.
Sixteen-year-old Lu Chen struggles to survive a succession of deadly crises: plague, pirates, and steppe raiders. Gradually, he uncovers the mystery of his origins. He is the final key to the Prometheus Project. The code for human evolution is buried in his genes, along with a lock called "humanity."
He crawls out of the ashes of Yaojia Village and grows amid the flames of war at Longmen.
To fight the world-ending plague, he swallows every poison and refines medicine with his own blood. To repel the deep-sea invasion, he incurs a debt to the Spirit of the Abyss. To put an end to the grassland cavalry, he turns the enemy troops against their own side and wins through cunning. In the end, he faces Alpha, the Antarctic overlord who seeks to purge humanity and create a "perfect new humanity," as well as his own grandfather, Chen Shouzhuo, who intends to reshape civilization through "absolute rationality."
The Seven Stars shine. Humanity and divinity clash. Amid the ruins, where will civilization go?
Through one sacrifice after another, Lu Chen comes to understand that true civilization needs neither gods nor a perfect utopia. It only needs imperfect people to join hands in the mud, pass the torch in the darkness, coexist amid their differences, rise after making mistakes, and leave this imperfect world to the next generation so they can carry on.
An Eastern science-fiction epic about survival, choice, and inheritance.
Amid the ashes, only humanity endures.
