There Is a Root in the Dark

In 2093, the Neural Era began. Human brains were implanted with Lingshu chips, linking consciousness directly to the global Neural Cloud. The wealthy of the Sky Dome District floated 3,000 meters above the earth, controlling the world through data streams. In the Wasteland, the disconnected struggled to survive on the ground, permanently blacklisted by the System. Jiang Yizhao, twenty-six, was once the only son of the head of the Seven Founding Conglomerates. In a single night, his father's consciousness was publicly stripped away, his mother was sent to the seventh level of the Neural Reformation Institute, and he was implanted with discredited-user firmware before being dumped in a Wasteland scrapyard. His Lingshu chip was locked, his memory crystals confiscated, and all his neural functions disabled. He became a "half-linked" user: he had a chip, but couldn't do anything with it. His only inheritance was an encrypted memory his father sent before being erased, along with a sentence that cut through the corrupted data: "Before dawn, it is darkest." In the Wasteland, he met Shen Zhiyu. A girl who trusted no one, whose mother had died in the Neural Reformation Institute. She survived by modifying chips for the disconnected and lived by the creed, "Only the living have the right to seek revenge"...