In 2155, the people of Xinhai City are kept in a “steel forest” precisely controlled by a central supercomputer. Full automation makes everything safe and comfortable, yet leaves people numb. Desperate to feel truly “alive,” Lin Xia, a girl with severe social anxiety and poor physical fitness but an exceptionally high Intelligence stat of 19, is persuaded by a friend to join the beta test of "Phantom Realm", a groundbreaking neural-link VR game. When connecting to the System, Lin Xia stubbornly rejects the safety measures and cranks pain feedback up to 100 percent, right to the brink of death. But as the game unfolds, she discovers that this world is terrifyingly “real.”
