In an age when everyone depends on implanted disaster cores for power, Lu Chen has failed his seventh fusion test. All he can do is dismantle the remains of disaster beasts at a salvage yard to earn money for his adoptive father's medicine. Then a disaster beast that had been mistakenly declared dead opened its eyes on his workbench, and he discovered that the cores diagnosed as rejected had never left his body at all. They had vanished inside him. Other people's power resides in their cores; his power has grown into his bones. As a masked hunter appears on the nighttime battlefield, the officer investigating him turns out to be the very adoptive father who taught him how to use a knife. And fifteen years ago, that same man ordered the gate shut, leaving Lu Chen's biological father outside.
