The gray tide is coming. It's not a virus, it's not radiation, it's "recycling".
When civilization reaches its peak, the system will initiate formatting - swallowing all organic and inorganic matter and clearing the disk for the next era. Human beings are just another batch of files to be deleted in this infinite loop.
Jiang Lin is just a self-employed repairman, guarding the closed ancestral workshop and repairing old machines that no one wants. On the first day of the apocalypse, he was crushed under the rubble, and when he was about to die, he touched the "black iron" that his family had guarded for generations.
That's not metal, it's a fragment of the "Creator Core" from the previous era.
The fragments merge with him, giving him a "trance moment" - touching any object can read its entire composition; after understanding it, it can be reconstructed instantly.
Others are picking up garbage in the last days, but he is "creating things" in the last days.
A scrapped engine, he can "read" its design flaws and "reconstruct" a perfect version; a pile of metal fragments in the ruins, he can "reverse compile" into weapons; a crashed armored vehicle, he can make it roar again.
But he soon discovered that every time he "seduced the gods", he was exchanging his own flesh and blood.
His left hand became a machine, and he no longer felt his wife's temperature; his legs were replaced with alloy, and he lost the touch of the wind blowing against his skin when running. If he does not stop using his abilities, he will eventually become a vessel for the "Creator Core" - a mechanical god without emotions.
And in the deepest part of the gray tide, the existence that caused "recycling" is awakening.
It is not here to destroy humanity.
It is here to check the "recycling progress".
And Jiang Lin's "core fragment" is the only "system backdoor" in the world.
