Lu Chen, an overworked programmer, heard his ex-girlfriend say one thing when she broke up with him: "It's not that I mind you being broke. I just can't see you trying." He didn't argue. Then a pop-up appeared on his phone:
Reincarnator's Invitation. Accept?
He tapped Decline, and the screen went black.
In the System's reincarnation instances, other people's Systems gave them skills and attribute points. Lu Chen's gave him only a single thread: silver-white, stretching from between his brows and connecting to everyone's karma.
The first person was a girl in the basement of an abandoned middle school. She kept writing someone's name on the blackboard, waiting for eleven years for someone who never showed up.
The second was in a city ruled by algorithms. The AI scored every citizen, and those who failed were taken away for "optimization." The thread passed through the streets and underground, stopping before a still-running core: a living brain.
With every instance, the thread dug one layer deeper into the foundations of its rules. Deep within the instances, code that didn't belong to those worlds began to appear. Someone had left a back door when the rules were first written, waiting for someone who could read that code.
Then one day, the System displayed a message that wasn't on the mission list: "Your type of karmic ability has been recorded. The first two users with the same ability are dead. You're the third!"
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