Twenty years ago, the sky split open. Humanity collectively called the things that poured in from the other side of the rift aberrant beasts.
The rift brought disaster, but it also brought humanity's purification. One after another, people awakened sequences and became Sequence Users.
Humanity built seven bastions, protective domes propped up by the domains of SSS-rank Sequence powerhouses. Since then, all land, sea, and sky beyond the domes have belonged to the aberrant beasts.
At sixteen, everyone undergoes sequence assignment. Place your palm on the assignment device, and three seconds decide your entire life.
Chen Zhou's reading was blank. Like seventy percent of people in the outer city, he became sequence-less: an ordinary person.
The official record read: "No Sequence."
At nineteen, he worked as a porter, recorded labor for a transport team, and went out with hunting parties to keep records, all to help his younger sister, Chen Xing, get a better sequence rank and ability when she underwent assignment. During one hunt, people died, and a D-rank aberrant beast core fell into the mud unnoticed. He picked it up, hoping only to trade it for two months' rations.
That night, the beast core grew hot in his palm, cracked, and disappeared.
A layer of beast hide grew over his hand.
Only then did he understand: the assignment device couldn't read him not because he had no sequence, but because he had no ability value.
His ability had been there from birth. He simply didn't have enough ability value.
Other people's limits remain unchanged for life, while she seemed unaffected by the side effects of beast cores.
But every step of growth had to be bought with his life, and every increase in strength had to be hidden more carefully than the last.
Because the domes had only seventy-three years left.
Because the lives of people in the outer city were fuel for maintaining the domes.
Because his younger sister's name had already appeared on the preliminary list.
He had to grow strong enough before the walls broke.
But the further he went, the more he realized...
The question wasn't whether he was strong enough.
The question was that he himself was the wall.
