Shen Du had worked as a neurosurgeon for fourteen years, watching countless people's skulls opened and closed on the operating table. He had always wondered: inside that gray-white mass of tissue, was there really something called "I"?
A car accident gave him an answer, in a way he could never have anticipated.
Death was not the end. He awoke in the body of a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in philosophy, with a tower in his mind that belonged to no era on Earth, and a group of inhuman beings extracting light from his body and sealing it inside tiny vessels.
Cheng Yan studied the creation myths of the pre-Qin period. When he began to reexamine the stories of Nüwa shaping clay, Pangu creating the world, Fuxi drawing the trigrams, and Cangjie inventing writing through the eyes of his former life as a surgeon, he realized these tales passed down for thousands of years were not the imaginings of the ancients. They were an encrypted engineering log, recording the final and greatest forging of an ancient civilization.
Humans are creations. But they are not slaves; they are vessels. Within every body sleeps a spark of consciousness from the depths of the sea of stars, waiting to be kindled by suffering, choice, and love, one by one.
However, a secret organization called the Guixu Society has guarded this secret for three thousand years. They believe that truth is fire: in prepared hands, it is a tool; in unprepared hands, a disaster.
When a mentor's concern becomes a test, when a chance encounter on the subway gives away his whereabouts, and when the price of awakening begins to slowly erode his attachment to his mother, his beloved, and his identity in this life, Cheng Yan must choose:
Should he keep seeking answers, or stop before he learns too much?
Darwin saw the stage,
