The moment you open your eyes, cold, transparent threads have sunk into your limbs, throat, and eyelids like the sharpest fangs of fate. Each one whispers, “Move. Perform. You were a puppet all along.”
This isn’t a mental hospital. It’s the backstage repair factory of the Faceless Puppetmaster God, a colossal puppet theater fueled by humanity’s collective unconscious and decorated with classical opera and puppet shows.
Every ten cycles, the world reaches its finale and resets. All the threads return to zero, memories are forcibly stitched into new skins, and blood and tears are packed away in the prop chest.
Only a tiny number of “Unstrung” can retain fragments through a reset, yet they are forced to die and awaken again and again in layers of theaters, bearing eternal witness to the truth: “Freedom is merely the most exquisite and cruelest mockery the Puppetmaster God reserves for broken puppets.”
When Lin Duanxian wakes, he discovers that he was born without several of his control strings. He isn’t a perfectly obedient puppet, but a defective one from birth: the first physiological, flesh-and-blood rebellion against humanity’s eternal fate of being controlled.
Very nice, new theme