Every screen in the world went dark at once, and blood-red words appeared across the sky screen:
[The God-Creation Project has begun.]
Thunderstorms tore open the night, and more words appeared:
[The Godmaking Trial: nine in ten will die.]
The next moment, one person was chosen at random from each country and made a “kindling of creation,” forced into the trial. Their success or failure would affect their country, but the true rewards and penalties were nothing but an indecipherable jumble of symbols.
The unknown is the most terrifying thing of all.
Lin Jin, one of the youngest geniuses at Huaxia University, enrolled at fifteen and double-majored in architecture and computer science. Calm, restrained, and almost inhumanly detached, he was selected as Huaxia’s trial participant: HX-001.
The first place he entered was the forbidden land known as the Life-Stealing Corridor, a damp, foul-smelling place that seemed to have buried countless living beings.
There was no way back and no mercy, only one icy rule:
The living may proceed. The dead must stop.
In the darkness, hordes of corpses crawled along the ground. Walls were covered in last words, and pale lights revealed shadows that should not exist. Names, voices, and shadows were gradually stripped away during the trial. The world believed this was merely a game to select kindling, but as Lin Jin ventured deeper, he discovered the truth:
The so-called God-Creation Project was never meant to create gods.
It was meant to choose new bearers of fate for certain beings who had long since fallen into slumber.
When the sky screen turns bloodred and the old gods whisper, the true trial will only just have begun.
