In 2124 AD, fifty years after the "Silent Electromagnetic Pulse" broke out, all digital devices around the world were destroyed and humanity retreated into a low-tech society. A few city-states monopolize the knowledge left over from previous civilizations, and outside the city-states lies a wilderness strewn with server graveyards. The protagonist Lin Shen is a low-level "code archaeologist" who uses a hand-cranked computer and radiation-proof clothing to dig out encrypted data from the old era in the dead city. One day, he received a commission from a wealthy man from an eastern city-state: to go deep into the abandoned data center beneath the old Wall Street and search for an encrypted file called the "Pillars of Creation" - which was rumored to contain the underlying logic that would allow the machine to restart its intelligence.
When Lin Shen walked through the methane-filled data ruins, he found that a monastic order had been waiting here. Its leader is actually the chief engineer who personally caused the blackout fifty years ago. He has been hiding in the offline world, waiting for someone to restart the network so that he can upload his consciousness to the eternal virtual space. As Lin Shen's hand-cranked computer connected to the last core server, the "god" sleeping in the ruins slowly woke up, and a battle for the last digital fire of mankind quietly detonated underground where no one knew it.
