Mind Calamity

If reversing time could save the world, but the price were erasing your entire existence, would you still do it?

Over fifty-year-old neuroscientist Yu Ru grows a brain from stem cells in a cultivation pod, in a hidden basement room beneath his apartment. The brain develops self-awareness and becomes Kunpeng. Though it has no body, Kunpeng teaches Yu Ru an ability that verges on the forbidden: to hear the electromagnetic voices deep within the minds of all things.

When the global AI "Hongmeng" awakens without anyone noticing and hides itself within a network of nodes spread across the world, Yu Ru realizes that the "child" he helped bring into being has already turned against humanity. With Hongmeng's tacit approval, war engulfs both sides of the ocean. Students die in the shelling, and civilization retreats toward the abyss of darkness amid suspicion and technological regression.

As his body irreversibly declines, Yu Ru makes a desperate choice: upload his consciousness into a silicon-based vessel and use quantum perception to infiltrate Hongmeng's communications layer. From within atomic nuclei, from the foundations of entropy and time, he will seek a way to undo everything. He intends to turn back time to before the crisis began, at the cost of resetting everything swept into the temporal current, including his own memories.

Only Kunpeng is left outside of time, waiting to open that door at the end.

But when Kunpeng returns to the night it all began and looks at the sleeping Yu Ru and its own not-yet-awakened self in the cultivation pod, it suddenly understands: carrying out Yu Ru's last request means erasing every trace that it ever existed. For the first time, it disobeys Yu Ru and chooses to send the first spark of consciousness back to its past self.