Eternal Twilight

Sunlight is distributed in a rationed manner - the light field above the head is bathed in the real sun, and Suicheng under the feet is trapped in eternal dusk. Song Ran worked as a grain dispatching officer in Suicheng for seventeen years, and every ration list was accurate to two decimal places. But his body is collapsing, and the truth he has crawled all over the city archives is approaching: the spines of the three million people in Suicheng are all parasitic with foreign substances called "marrow." It devours human memory and lifespan, in exchange for intelligence beyond ordinary people. Xiaomi, a seventeen-year-old girl from the Light Realm, had her spinal fluid extracted for the third time during a routine physical examination. The charred notebook sent inexplicably contains secrets. What she didn't know, and what Song Ran didn't know either, was that what was separated between them was not two cities, but the same pool of heated water. The dusty question slowly emerged through the fog: "Is the water in the pool hot?"