Urban horror + mystery + workplace power struggles + evolving abilities
A nobody’s rise to the top isn’t a power fantasy. It’s a game with no end.
Ninety-three yuan and seventy cents.
That was all Chen Du had in his pockets at the end of the month. A computer science graduate, he squeezed into a partitioned room barely 5.8 square meters wide in an urban village, ate instant noodles that cost one yuan and fifty cents, and unfailingly sent a thousand yuan each month to his grandmother in the mountains.
He thought the hardest part of life was staying alive.
Until one late night, a shadow beneath a bridge pressed against the back of his neck.
He began to hear other people’s thoughts.
His mentor’s concern was a scheme. His boss’s kindness was a trap. Beneath his coworkers’ smiles lurked nothing but knives. Everyone in the workplace had another face hidden beneath the surface, and he became the only one who could see what lay below.
Listening, manipulation, control. His abilities evolved step by step, and their cost devoured his personality just as steadily. Every time he used them, he became a little less “Chen Du.”
He used his abilities to expose the company’s conspiracy and bring down the man who had smiled while grooming him as a pawn. He won.
Then he discovered that there was another game board beyond the one he knew.
The one who set the game was laughing. The one who broke it was still caught in it. And the dark eye on the back of his neck said:
“The door is about to open.”
The plot is eloquent, and the more I watch it, the more I feel.