The sky above Gray City was always gray.
Towering walls separated the wasteland from those clinging to life inside the city.
Fail the practical exam, and you would be driven outside the walls, left to die in the outer ruins.
Lin Zhou was seventeen. His left eye was covered with a faded black cloth, and the Order Bureau had measured his blood vitality at just 380. Everyone laughed at him as the lowest-ranked deadweight.
To get the medicine that could save his life, he risked everything and swallowed the strange embryo flesh from beyond the walls.
From then on, an otherworldly parasitic corpse lay dormant inside him.
His capacity to devour expanded wildly, and his blood vitality surged by leaps and bounds. But every night, hunger and thirst gnawed at his bones.
“Remember, your name is now Pei Zhou, an outsider bought by the Pei family.”
A single registration form saddled him with a debt of three million.
The Institute of Natural Studies classified him as L-07 and treated him as a living specimen.
Inside the walls, family power plays, institutional scrutiny, and vicious competition among examinees closed in from every side.
Beyond the walls lay hunting grounds among the ruins, overrun with eerie creatures, where life and death were decided in an instant.
“I’m not Pei Zhou.”
“My name is Lin Zhou.”
