"They say there's something wrong with me. Paranoia? Severe depression?"
"Maybe. But I know the fangs this world bares are never just a figment of my imagination."
Shen Xiujun, a boy whose name is steeped in the smell of rust.
When he was seventeen, the way he gnawed on an apple in a corner of the police station, the cold wariness churning in his eyes and his near self-destructive madness, made veteran detective Pei Siye catch a whiff of ominous bloodshed.
As he dug deeper, Pei Si also uncovered a "Rusty" lurking behind the internet: a dark fiction writer obsessed with cold cases, who championed "an eye for an eye" and wrote stories as cold and precise as instruction manuals.
When the fictional methods of murder in the boy's stories chillingly matched the real-life, bizarre scene of a body dumped in a water tank, his shattered mental world was laid bare before Pei Si.
An apple and a cold case tied a red thread between their fates.
Four years later, Shen Xiujun returned to his old stomping grounds in disguise as a "dangerous" news editor.
Was the young man before him a witness to a bloody mystery, its victim, or the mastermind lurking in the shadows?
When a series of student deaths involving bizarre methods and pointing to "perfect self-destruction" resurfaced, their scenes formatted like phones greedily licked clean, they became a cold chain linking the past and present.
A program called Dark Code quietly emerged.
It wove despair and lured people into sacrifice, like an ancient evil spirit.
To tear open the truth, one of them had to use himself as bait.
On one side was a deadly scheme, with the cult's tendrils closing in at every turn. On the other was the police, relentlessly piecing together the clues. The police tape was also a bloody thread connecting their fates.
When the blood of their loved ones stained the road home and a giant eye opened in the deep sea, they were forced to dance on the tightrope of trust.
On the edge of an abyss where truth and delusion intertwined, a deadly confrontation unfolded over fate, madness, and redemption.
He was the only spark in the rusted ruins of his fate. He was the forbidden shade of gray in his black-and-white world.
When a detective's instincts brushed against an editor's lies, they would wager on saving each other in the web of crime.
Theme: Keep away from cults, starting with yourself
