Zhong Qi had been trapped in the same Monday for the ninth time.
At nine in the morning, he woke up right on schedule at his desk. Xiao Chen at reception went to the restroom at 10:23. Old Liu from Sales slammed his hand on the table at 2:15 in the afternoon. He had seen all of it eight times. He could recite everyone's movements with his eyes closed.
Only he remembered. Only he was caught in the loop.
Deep Pupil Technology looked like an ordinary internet company, but in reality it was a System that used human lives as fuel for computing power. Every employee who was "let go" became a computing unit for the servers. The cleaning lady went into the boss's office for seven minutes every Wednesday. Before each round of "layoffs," the head of security always asked, "Which number are you?"
Zhong Qi had tried to escape. He took Monday off, but that night he was eliminated at home, and the loop reset. He tried carving clues into the server, but they had all vanished the next day. He tried to bear it alone, until he discovered that Chen Gang, the head of security, was also trapped in the loop: the previous Zhong Qi, after failing, had been turned into an enforcer by the company.
There was only one solution: make the company go bankrupt. Not escape, but bring it down from within.
He needed Yang Yang, the company's most talented programmer and the junior sister of an employee who had died suddenly three years earlier. She was the only one who could carry information across the loop. The price was that she remembered nothing about him after each reset. Again and again, he had to win her over from scratch.
And the countdown in the boss's office was ticking toward zero.
He opened his eyes for the ninth time. This time, he would no longer beg to survive.
Zhong Qi opened his eyes for the ninth time. This time, he didn't intend to fight for his life anymore.
