Tectonic Gap

Chen Ji, an ordinary programmer, has been living a repetitive and stereotyped solitary life for many years. One day, subtle cracks frequently appear in reality: the mirror movement is delayed, the convenience store employee badge is inexplicably changed, the date of the newspaper is misplaced, and a butterfly-shaped red mark appears on the collarbone. He began to record anomalies and met people who knew the truth about the world by chance. He learned that reality is divided into multi-layered cognitive dimensions L0-L3. Human beings can travel through various layers through "frequency modulation" of consciousness. The butterfly mark is the identity price of those who tune in. The butterfly corridor of the abandoned library connects the reality L0 and the memory layer L1. In the gray wasteland, there are former people who have lost their marks and cannot return. Chen Ji gets acquainted with Lin Mu, the awakened NPC, Chang Xin, who studies abnormal AI, and Lao Yu, the noodle shop owner who knows the past. Gradually, he learns to actively adjust the frequency. He enters the L2, which stores deep memories, and the L3 archives, which controls the world's consensus, and contacts Zhou Yan, the landscape architect. The story has many parallel lines: Shen Du is looking for the consciousness that was lost seven years ago, Chang Xin's AI model captures abnormal signals in the cognitive layer, timekeeper He Yu observes the underlying data of the world, and bookstore clerk Su Chi holds secret coordinates. As the rift continued to expand, butterfly marks began to appear on ordinary people, and a "butterfly riot" broke out. A set of autonomous system logic batch-marked people who could sense the world's deviation, and concealed a program to recover stray tuners. While exploring the underlying rules of the multi-layered world, everyone faces the crisis of being positioned and regaining consciousness. After recognizing that the world is a modifiable consensus structure, they make their own choices about staying, exploring, and resisting.