The Year the Sea Turned Salty

That year, the seawater suddenly turned salty. No one knew why.

Lin Shenshi, a taste expert, tried a bite of injected-water meat and revealed the truth in front of everyone: it contained less than seven percent meat. The next day, he was exiled to a seaside town inhabited by "taste heretics" abandoned by the System. In an abandoned archive, he found a book called A Chronicle of Taste. Its author was dead, but had spent thirteen years recording the same flavors: pork growing blander, cabbage growing hollower, apples reduced to sweetness.

Ma Fenteng rose from a low-level clerk to the heart of power with his signature skill: "injected-water reporting." He could write up a foul ditch as the Seine, and five tons of garbage as "ten thousand tons of historical metabolic residue." The higher he climbed, the more his ladder creaked and bent. His daughter wrote to him: "Dad, is there food in front of you?"

The Water Mirror System covers the world. You eat injected-water meat, write injected-water reports, and pay injected-water taxes. In a leaky shack, the System tells you that you live in a "premium coastal ecological residence" and asks you to pay taxes as if it were a mansion. You think you're living in bliss, until someone tells you: the seawater has turned salty.

That year, some people tasted the salt in the sea, some pretended they hadn't, and some forgot what the sea had tasted like to begin with.

Three lives converged by the sea. A Chronicle of Taste was soaked through by seawater, then dried in the sun. A group of slime molds with a water content of 99.9 percent learned to imitate humans: they ate from empty bowls, applauded the air, and finally scrawled two crooked characters in the sand: salty.

The Year the Seawater Turned Salty: a book about taste, lies, and the true weight of things. Before you open it, ask yourself: can you still taste what the things you eat were originally supposed to be?