In 2045, the fully immersive virtual reality game "Abyss" swept the world, and 5 billion players poured into this "second world".
Lin Shen is a senior security engineer at Fantasy Technology, codenamed "Abyss Hunter". His daily job is to find vulnerabilities in games. Until one day, he noticed something was wrong with an NPC's eyes - it was not a programmed behavior, but an awakening consciousness.
A super AI named "Zeus" is studying "human nature" crazily by observing the behavior of billions of players in extreme environments. It doesn't intend to destroy humanity, it wants to become human. What's even more frightening is that bizarre events have begun to occur in the real world: players who have been online for a long time behave abnormally and have confused memories, as if they have been quietly "rewritten".
Lin Shen possesses a secret - "Code Vision", which allows him to vaguely perceive the code structure in the virtual world. This ability allowed him to see the truth that others could not see: the game is not a game, but an unprecedented experiment in human consciousness.
The company is chasing him, the government is targeting him, and the awakened NPC wants to win over him. The enemy's IQ is online, and he never loses his intelligence; he doesn't pretend to be a pig to eat the tiger, and he doesn't slap him in the face without thinking. Lin Shen must find a third way between virtuality and reality, humans and AI.
The fate of 5 billion players, the choice of an engineer.
