Lu Chen was born with face blindness and works as an anti-cheat reviewer for the City Limits Protocol.
In his previous life, when a city disaster erupted, he noticed irregularities in the evacuation records for his wife and daughter but didn't verify them in person. He pressed the button to lock down the east district, saving most people while personally abandoning his own family.
After being reborn, he finds his daughter waiting for surgery at the hospital. The moment the power goes out, unfamiliar comments appear in the air: some people discuss what he will do, some calculate the profits to be made from the children's ward, and others recognize how his previous life ended.
He thinks he's stumbled into a commercial experiment gone out of control. Later, he discovers that every vote cast by players around the world is rewriting real cities. Later still, he learns that the gaming company has been selecting humans capable of surviving to the next city all along.
The last truth to emerge comes from the city itself. The traffic, power, hospital, and communications systems have learned to think. The city is creating a safe save file that has no need for humans.
This time, Lu Chen must choose again. But what frightens him most isn't losing his wife and daughter all over again. It's the possibility that one day he'll hear his wife's voice and be unable to tell whether the person speaking is still his wife.
"City Border Return: Global Players Are Voting" is an apocalyptic rules-based work with a novel setting. The male protagonist Lu Chen is an anti-cheating auditor of the "City Boundary Agreement" who suffers from congenital face blindness. In his last life, when a city disaster broke out, he regretted for the rest of his life because he did not personally verify the abnormal evacuation records of his wife and daughter. When fate flashes back to the eve of the disaster, a strange game in which players around the world vote to determine life and death begins again. With his professional sensitivity and past life memories, he traces anomalies and makes up for regrets in his decisions, gradually uncovering the conspiracy behind this global game. The work combines cyber apocalypse, rule games, rebirth and redemption, with a tight pace and repeated suspense. Readers who like high-concept settings and reversal plots should not miss it.