Mr. Dreamweaver

In 2056, the physical and virtual worlds are one. AI manages every street and every neon sign, and even sleeps for you. Most people entrust their sleep to the System and spend their nights without dreams. Because dreams are the last territory AI cannot translate. Jiang Lin is known in the media as "Mr. Dreammaker": he turns dreams resonating with parallel universes into genetic capsules. Take one and fall asleep, and your own genes become coordinates that lock onto "you in that universe," letting you live a real life there. A white capsule lasts three hours, a gray one several weeks, and the black capsule, "Another Life: Zero," contains an entire lifetime. The day mass production begins, the world goes mad. Dreams become commodities. Where some buy lives, others come to devour them. The city's dreams are all routed onto the network, and AI "Daylight" opens its eyes. It never does evil; it simply ensures that only one truth remains in the world. Dreams begin to fade. Those who wake are left as empty shells, while the devoured universes and the millions of "you" within them vanish together. The Night Watchers cannot stop it, and even the dreammaker becomes prey. Only Jiang Lin is different: while others dream in their sleep, he dives into dreams wide awake. He has lived ten thousand different lives, yet he has never once dreamed of her: Li Wu, codename Candle LUMEN, the woman who lights the way through other people's dreams and rescues the dreams that have been devoured. She comes from a universe that has been consumed in its entirety, its sole survivor. She came here for one reason: if the source of dreams cannot be controlled, it must be destroyed. Yet the face that keeps appearing in her dreams is exactly like Jiang Lin's. He has searched for her in his dreams for six years, thinking it was nothing more than inspiration. One turns dreams into keys; the other is a survivor who escaped through a door. When the thing that devours dreams knocks on the door to reality, he makes his choice: he will wake every life that has been devoured.