Six years ago, the planner Zhou Congan died mysteriously, leaving only three mysterious relics and an unsolvable double-layered cage, trapping all the forces in the chess game.
Six years later, his apprentice Qin Yi was trapped in the vortex of the game. In order to break the prison cage and explore the truth about the betrayal and death, he traveled among the major prisoner camps. Everyone competes for relics, checks and balances, and fights. Everyone thinks that they are the chess players who break the game, but they don't know that everyone is a manipulated chess piece.
The undercover secrets that spanned ten years, the in vivo experiments that dehumanized the human nature, the good and evil personalities that were forcibly torn apart, and the god-killing authority that concealed murderous intentions emerged layer by layer. When the three relics merged and the incomplete chess player woke up, everyone realized that this chess game did not have a two-way ending from the beginning.
The old gods have come to an end, and the embers and sparks breed new ambitions. The visible prison is easy to break, but the invisible fate is hard to escape.
In the end, no one wins and everyone is imprisoned.
Purpose: This book uses the chess game and the cage as the core metaphors, revolves around the game of human nature and the shackles of fate, explores the deep propositions of freedom, good and evil, redemption and power, and interprets a tragic game without a winner. The novel breaks the solid values of black and white. The protagonist Zhou Cong'an is caught in the gap between black and white. His personality is torn apart by trauma. He resists the darkness in extreme ways, but ultimately becomes a prisoner of obsession. The author uses this to reveal that good and evil coexist in human nature. There are never absolutely pure good people and evil people in the world. Extreme justice and violence have the same origin. At the same time, this book redefines the meaning of imprisonment: the cages of the body and memory are all appearances, and what truly traps everyone is desire, obsession, weakness, and escapism. Blindly placing your hope in salvation by the strong and waiting for freedom from others is in itself self-imprisonment. There is never a perfect solution to the chess game. Relying on power to shuffle the cards and create a new order will only give rise to a new round of darkness. The final conclusion of the book: There is no god in the world, there is no solution to fate, and freedom is inherently scarce; all living beings are imprisoned, and the only way for ordinary people to save themselves is to face up to the shortcomings of human nature and refuse to blindly follow and rely on them.