[Apocalypse survival] [Urban otherworld] [Radio communication] [Program summoning] [Ruined city management] [Mythical monsters] [System upgrades] [Hardcore survival] [Companionship across time] [Lonely city restoration] [Light sci-fi] [Male-oriented power fantasy]
At midnight, Frostsea City suddenly “went offline.” Every living person disappeared, while the streets, buildings, subway stations, and shopping malls were perfectly copied into a fog-shrouded inner world. Mythical monsters crawled out of advertising screens, sewers, and old servers like software bugs. When Lu Yanzhou, a hardware repairman and shut-in, woke up, all he had at home was a shortwave radio left by his grandfather and a bizarre program that had appeared on its own: Mythical Source Code Analysis Protocol. It could analyze monsters’ source code, contain them, summon them, and rewrite mythical creatures, but it was strictly limited by electricity, hardware, signal, and materials. Lu Yanzhou had planned to gather enough source stones to return to reality, but then he heard the voice of a young woman over the radio, calling from a ruined city thirteen years in the future. Her name was Ning Zhixia. She was all alone, guarding a fallen Frostsea, and knew what the future held, but lacked supplies, maps, and hope from the past. One was in the present, having just fallen into the inner world; the other was in a future, thirteen years later, where everything had been reduced to ruins. One could summon monsters to repair the city’s nodes; the other knew the brutal rules of life after doomsday. Across the radio waves, they worked together to synchronize their clocks and take stock of water, electricity, food, ammunition, and signal towers. As monster hordes, a countdown to the city’s collapse, echoes of future zombie swarms, and unknown human forces closed in, they tried to bring a dead city back to life. But when Lu Yanzhou repaired the first base station, he discovered that the future Ning Zhixia described had been caused by his own actions.
