The Wish Ball

The Wish-Granting Golden Ball is a full-length post-apocalyptic supernatural sci-fi novel. In the Age of First Contact, three thousand silver spheres descend upon Earth, creating infection zones where the laws of physics break down. A tiny number of survivors gain "superpowers," whose forms draw on wuxia, xianxia, animation, urban legends, and pop culture. To prevent a second wave of infection, the Center for Disease Control recruits infected people as field agents, sending them on high-risk missions with code names, memory wipes, and reality-stabilizing devices. The protagonist, Wu Sheng, is a traditional opera actor. When playing Zhao Yun, he can wield the power of Zhao Zilong. Under code names like "Friday" and "Valkyrie," he and his teammates venture into abandoned cities, libraries, underground lairs, and dragon nests, facing monsters born from fear, obsession, and childhood fantasies collapsing in on themselves. Each case is like a cultural nightmare: flying men, tin frogs, a squash god, the Sleepy Old Woman, a living tank, a mantis queen, and dragon hordes... As the missions progress, the truth behind the "Wish-Granting Golden Ball" gradually emerges: the infection is no mere virus. It occurs when reality's uniqueness is shattered and consciousness uses cultural symbols to anchor the world anew. Amid sacrifice, forgetting, and madness, humanity struggles to protect the boundaries of the normal world. The novel weaves an epic overarching plot through a series of individual cases, blending Chinese opera, folk horror, and science fiction to explore memory, free will, collective faith, and the survival of civilization.