Desolate Bones

The wasteland is the cemetery of the old era, and every bone is an erroneous memory. Shi Gan is a bone-burning slave in Heishanwu. His sense of taste is necrotic and he cannot taste saltiness, but he can taste the bitterness of the bone meal. He was surrounded by five "system errors": Liu Su, whose fingers were twisted into hooks, was an unauthorized biological interface; the lame man with three-legged sparrows, which was the lost energy key; the hard-of-hearing Zhang Jiang, which was a receiver allergic to the resonance of the earth's crust; Chen Hou, who kept banging the pot on his pipe, was the star core fragment that catalyzed life; and the dog boy who stuttered when he was nervous and drew circuit diagrams in his dreams, which was an unformatted database. When the chief of the castle put them into the furnace to "fire" a sacrificial knife, Shi Gan chewed the bitter error correction code in his mouth and hit the dead center of the door axis with a hammer. That crisp sound was not that the door collapsed, but that the firewall from the previous era was broken. This story does not talk about immortality or becoming a god. It only talks about how a group of people who were judged as "waste products" used their incomplete bodies to repair the collapsed world. The human race does not need a perfect god, it only needs a cracked but hard enough spine.