Debt Projection

In the seventh year since instances began appearing, Chen Yu, a high school senior repeating his final year, awakens his bloodline in his rented room. When the door is kicked open, the clan enforcement squad throws a death bill at him: three hundred thousand karma points, or get lost in the radiation zone to serve as cannon fodder in an instance. The captain sneers. “Your ancestors ran up the debt, so their descendants pay with their lives. That’s only fair.” Chen Yu says nothing. The Fate Simulator in his mind has just shown him that in three seconds, the captain will be struck by the instance’s radiation and bleed from every orifice. And Li Suyi, the haughty heiress standing at the back of the crowd, will be on her knees begging him to team up in ten minutes.

Three seconds later, the captain collapses, twitching. Ten minutes later, Li Suyi pushes through the crowd and rushes over, tossing him a black card. “Run a prediction for me, and all these karma points are yours.” Chen Yu looks at the more distant scene displayed by the simulator. The so-called ancestral debt is nothing but a thousand-year-old fraud, a conspiracy fabricated by the clans working together to frame him. He isn’t going to pay off the debt. He’s going to make everyone who owes him pay back every last bit, with interest.

Tonight, an endless instance waits just outside the window. He’ll make every clan in cyberpunk East Asia understand this: the life of the orphan Chen Yu is a debt that will never be repaid. His predictions gamble on nothing but the truth.