The Seventh Reincarnation: a Survival Guide to a Parallel World

District 7 has been free for three hundred years. The shadow of the Inquisitor has long since receded deep into the pages of history textbooks, and the remains of the Creator AI were buried under the foundation of the newly built square. The crooked neck tree is still growing, and the children in the village are still climbing it, but no one remembers when it took root. An orphan named Jiang Ying spent her aggressive childhood under the crooked neck tree and grew up with Ke Chi, a taciturn boy in the village. She thought she would always live like this - within the boundaries of District 7, on the edge of the ruins of the old era, under the eyes of friends and relatives. Until she pushed open a door that shouldn't have been opened. She scratched the crack in the corner of the wall with her fingernails. The wall peeled off, and there was a light inside. It was not coming from the outside, like the faint light from the inside of a door that had never been opened. She took half a step back and stepped forward again. The cracks are closing. The vines are closing. When she looked back, the way she came was gone. District 9. The sky there is gray and white and will not change. Everyone there has a code and the name is just a suffix to the number. There was no one she recognized there—but she saw Kechi's face. The way he looked at her was exactly the same as Ke Chi from District 7, with lowered eyes and slightly pursed lips. He cooked a bowl of noodles for her, adding less salt than he remembered. She thought it was him in another world, one who still remembered her existence. But this is not a reunion. Inquisitor, Anchor, Uncoded Anomaly—behind each name lay something she could not yet understand. The parallel world was cutting the same face into different pieces, and she slowly discovered that she was not the only one to slip through the cracks. Ke Chi from District 7 came to find her, carrying an ion current generator that was about to melt and crossing a road that he was not sure he could pass. One face, two worlds, three people's journey. About parallel time and space, about how individuals crushed by the system stick themselves back together, about a person hiding herself in another person's name for so long that she forgets her original name. ——There is an echo in the wasteland. And in that echo, the gap between the two areas was just big enough for a person to squeeze through sideways. Intention: "The second hand that moves inaccurately is also moving." What the system wants is accuracy, perfection, and error-free. People are not code. People will remember wrongly, wait for wrongly, and love wrongly. He will sit in front of an old lamp that cannot be repaired all afternoon, he will wear a coat with a name embroidered crookedly on it for many years, and he will traverse a whole wasteland for a pocket watch that is not accurate. The world is made up of countless "mistakes". It is these mistakes that make flowers grow on the ruins, make the silent people speak, and make those who can't wait to believe that "she doesn't want to come back." You are not the fault. You are the answer.