You think awakening is a gift from heaven.
You’re wrong.
Xing Wu is a corpse collector. After a beast tide, his job is to clear away the bodies of martial artists, test for lingering traces of qi, register them, bag them, and burn them. There is no future in the work, and nobody cares about it, but he doesn’t mind. After all, he has no “caring” function. Ever since brain surgery when he was nine, he hasn’t felt any emotions at all.
Then one day, he discovers a set of data: martial artists who have loved ones leave behind three times the concentration of residual qi as those who live alone.
He begins to investigate.
Every subway station is a wire. Every signal tower is a transmitter. The entire city is a gigantic culture dish, and all the awakened are batteries kept inside it. The qi they spend their whole lives cultivating isn’t meant to make them stronger. It’s meant to be harvested.
The deeper the feelings, the purer the quality, and the more valuable they are at harvest time.
The being behind it all is waiting at the highest point in the city, flickering on and off like a heartbeat at a frequency humans cannot hear.
Xing Wu decides to go up and take a look.
But he isn’t going to save anyone. He has simply done the math: if the conglomerate doesn’t die, sooner or later he’ll be broken. He chooses to make sure he isn’t the one who breaks first.
