“We thought we were trading for a better life, but we were pawning our souls.”
On the night his project was stolen, his girlfriend betrayed him, and a rich heir humiliated him in public, twenty-nine-year-old architect Lin Shen received a mysterious pop-up:
[Pay a price you can afford, and exchange it for a piece of the life lived by a stronger version of yourself in a parallel world.]
Health, pain, sleep, emotions, memories, luck, fragments of one’s lifespan…
He pawns himself again and again, trading for success, wealth, talent, and connections, and reality changes with each exchange. He rises from a lowly designer to a rising star in the industry, trampling everyone who once looked down on him, but gradually discovers…
His emotions are growing numb, his body is sending warning signals, his memories are breaking apart, and sometimes, late at night, another haggard version of himself appears in the mirror.
Then he buys a familiar yet unfamiliar sketchbook at an old bookstore, and then he runs into a man on the street who looks exactly like him, but is destitute.
“You stole my life,” the man says.
It turns out that every exchange steals the fate of another version of himself in a parallel world. And at the end of this transaction is a mastermind who plans to harvest every parallel self and achieve immortality.
Lin Shen faces his final choice: keep climbing to an illusory peak by stepping on countless versions of himself, or return everything and find his true, whole self again?
