In the Age of High Fevers, I Begin Saving the World from a Security Booth

By day, I'm the security guard at Building 037 in Xinzhu Community, patrolling and catching thieves. At night, I endure a lightning tribulation in the power distribution room, tempering my bones into bronze. Cole, a CIA elite, monitored me for 37 days, thinking he'd found a Chinese "anomaly." Only when rice-stalk tattoos sprouted across his tongue, and he began humming an ancient Zhuang song to the east every night at 9:37, did he realize: He wasn't the hunter. He was the first grain of rice I'd "planted" in the old order. My name is Beichen. They call me Jinghong. When A Yuanfei offered herself as a seed in 1966, scattering her soul through the rice paddies, I was the one who sealed the sword. Now the rice spirits have awakened: in the 8 Hz resonance of the ladies dancing in the square, in the oracle-bone script carved by elderly people living alone, and deep in the broth of every bowl of rice noodles seasoned with "ancestral spices." The Jiuli Group cloaks mysticism in science, spreading its Ci Ai network across Wall Street. And my bronze clasp grows hot, revealing eight characters: "Bingwu burns gold; nine purple forges bronze." They think the fever is an illness. I know it is the civilization's immune system making its final purge. They fear the birth of a new order. I laugh as they feed the grave that will bury them. On the third day of the third lunar month, the earth's veins will open. A Yi's image grows faint. She silently says, "I'll wait for you." As I count the golden patterns spreading across the back of Cole's neck, I flip the switch "It's time to cut the power to the old age." The main hooks: A security guard's rise × an overwhelming grasp of the truth × the birth of a civilization "You think he's working the night shift, but he's actually enduring a lightning tribulation. You think you're monitoring him, but you're actually feeding the new god." The security guard endures a lightning tribulation from the start, tempering