Lin Zhao died once. The drug trafficker she had pursued for seven years drove the wrong way into oncoming traffic. Without hesitation, she cranked the steering wheel and slammed her car into him broadside. When she opened her eyes again, she had become a twenty-year-old college student: the real daughter the Lin family had just brought home from an orphanage. The impostor had lived under her identity for eighteen years. Her right eye was still there, a ring of silvery-gray patterns embedded in its pale gold iris, allowing her to see the traces of cause and effect left behind by things. But now there was a countdown clock in her mind: three hundred and sixty-five days. She would disappear in a year.
Taking a detective’s memories and that eye with her, she returned to the Lin family, exposed the fake heiress’s straight-A-student facade, unearthed the cold case of a nanny who had switched two babies, and overturned the verdict in the case of a girl who fell to her death after being bullied at school. But the eye’s true purpose lay elsewhere. The drug trafficker she had hunted for seven years in her previous life, “He Yongnian,” had already been dead for eighteen years in this world. Yet the DNA of an unidentified male corpse found at a chemical plant was a perfect match for hers. Following the trail from that body, she uncovered a genetic-engineering network spanning twenty years. After “dying,” He Yongnian had left behind more than a criminal network: he had created a “vessel.” He had edited his own genetic sequence into a newborn’s genome, so that when the child turned twenty and the right eye awakened, another person’s soul would move in.
That person was Lin Zhao. Before he died, the nemesis she had pursued all her life had already engineered her rebirth. But the architect had miscalculated one thing: once a piece is on the board, its next move is no longer up to the player.
