Chapter 1

The rain in The Abyss always carried the acrid smell of scorched, ancient circuitry. It was a cocktail of industrial waste, expired machine oil, and stale oxygen that permeated every corner of New Babylon. I sat at my oil-stained workbench, the tip of my magnetic soldering iron crackling with violet electric arcs. Every time it touched metal, tiny sparks flew, illuminating my expressionless face.

My name is Kaine. In this forgotten slum, no one knew I used to be a "Senior Corrector" for the Ouroboros System. Those lofty domain administrators weren't even worthy of knowing my ID number. Now, I was just a mechanic scraping by on salvaged prosthetic parts. In front of me lay a reconnaissance drone, dismantled into a shattered mess; its logic locks were about to burn out, and its broken wiring was exposed—a wreckage that looked exactly like the force-formatted dead zones in my memory.

"Kaine, stop spacing out. If this engine isn't fixed by sundown, Old Barney will kick us both out of this cellar." Oliver kicked a pile of scrap. He was always frantic, like a wound-up, antique alarm clock. He was a chatterbox, which was precisely why he was the only living being I’d kept around after purging all "emotional redundancies"—at least he was authentic, and sufficiently mediocre.

I ignored him, embedding a nanoscopic crystallite into the drone's retinal module. The violet electric glow reflected in my pupils. In an instant, the noise of reality was muted. The sharp, piercing cicada-like ringing in my mind vanished, replaced by a deliberately suppressed, icy fragment of metallic memory. It detonated deep within my brain without warning, like a delayed-action bomb.

It was ten years ago, the beginning of Plane P-99. Back then, the "Ouroboros System" was my—and her—only God.

That day, outside the headquarters of Thorne Capital, the rain was torrential. It battered against the floor-to-ceiling windows, creating a dull, rhythmic roar. Lin Jiawei—Vivian, as she was known then—sat behind a dark oak desk, under siege by rival corporate tycoons. She had a face of breathtaking beauty, yet it looked pale and shattered from long-term anxiety and stress; the collar of her shirt was even crumpled.

I stood in the deepest part of the monitoring room, curled within the shadows. Through the virtual terminal constructed in the system, I was hammering at my keyboard like a madman. Back then, I was the "ghost backend," not even worthy of a name on the company payroll. My helmet display was filled with crimson warnings: "System overflow. Perimeter about to collapse." Her competitors had deployed a destructive "logic worm" to sever Thorne Group’s liquidity. If the perimeter broke, her decade of hard work would vanish in three seconds.

I didn't even have time to wipe the cold sweat from my forehead. My hands blurred across the keyboard, a silent war unfolding. I patched endlessly, building invisible walls before every fatal code gap.

Vivian’s hands were trembling. She believed those logic perimeters stabilizing the situation were "genius defense programs" she had built through sheer intuition. She was oblivious to the fact that the man sitting beside her, clutching a coffee cup with practiced calm—Ethan—was trembling with cold sweat.

Ethan was a clever fraud. His "top-tier elite" aura was merely a camouflage. His micro-expressions told me he couldn't even grasp the most basic recursive logic, yet his face was perfectly suited for the spotlight.

As the final virus firewall closed, Thorne Capital's plummeting stock price finally halted, then began to rebound. Vivian slumped into her swivel chair, exhaling deeply, as if dragged to the shore from the depths of a drowning sea.

"Ethan, did you really do it?" Her voice trembled with a fanaticism born of survival, a desperate obsession for her "lifeline." "The operation logic of those defense nodes... even in my wildest imaginations, it shouldn't have been possible. How could you think to use reverse-overflow logic to overwrite their master control? This is... this is an oracle."

I watched Ethan take a casual sip of coffee, his superficial composure making him look like a ridiculous clown. In that pseudo-gently, magnetic voice, he replied: "Algorithm games of this level are merely a daily exercise for me. Vivian, as long as it's for you, I’d be willing to write even the most complex genius code in the dead of night."

Lies. That was my code. That was a defense built with a decade of my life force.

If I could have cut the data gate, Vivian would have gone bankrupt in a minute. She would have had nothing, but the lie wouldn't have survived. But I couldn't. The contractual obligation shackled my subconscious like iron chains. As long as she didn't "love" me, I had to abide as her shadow, unconditionally, humbly, without leaving even a trace of a silhouette to protect her.

I stood in the shadows, my fingers quivering from prolonged high-intensity input. Due to brain overload, a warm liquid welled up from my nasal cavity and dripped onto the dark console. I lowered my head and saw my hands stained with code shards—glowing toxins伴 accompanied by the stench of blood.

I didn't step out of the shadows. I couldn't be anyone’s scenery.

Vivian turned and pulled Ethan into her embrace. Tears sparkled in her beautiful eyes—a victory I had bled for, now the温床 (hotbed) confirming her love for that fraud. She gazed up at Ethan, her eyes overflowing with worship, deep affection, and unconditional trust; yet when her line of sight swept over the dark corner of the monitoring room where I stood, it was like looking at a dead wall—she didn't pause for even a polite second.

In her world, the man standing in the light was Ethan. I was merely an intangible consumable, a KPI-filler who could be discarded at any moment.

"Kaine? Did you hear me? Stop dawdling!"

Oliver’s rough voice pulled me back from the bone-chilling memory into reality.

I slowly looked up. The drone’s retinal module in his hand vibrated with a successful dock hum. Outside, the searchlights of the Stability Force swept across our broken windows, the white light blinding. I calmly wiped the sticky machine oil off my hands and pushed the repaired drone toward Oliver.

"Heard you," I said calmly, my voice like ground pig iron. "Logic bugs like this are easy to fix. Just like some memories—when they rot, you have to clean them out. If you don't, they breed maggots."

Oliver looked at me with confusion, scratching his messy hair with a frown. "You... your eyes just now were terrifying, Kaine. It was like you were killing someone in thin air. Did you leave that company to escape debts, or something else?"

I didn't explain. Explanation is for the weak, and I preferred to respond with silence.

I walked to the broken window, watching the sickening, neon brilliance of New Babylon. The neon lights hung in the air like strings of dripping blood, signaling another night of debauchery for this world. I touched the pale pink scar on the back of my head, where the lethal contract once dubbed "Emotional Binding" had been implanted.

It had been removed by my own hand now. The forced, suffocating sense of obedience was gone. But I knew that as long as the remnants of that plane's consciousness lingered in the spatial cracks, seeking me—the "erroneous data"—this absurd play would never truly fall.

Even if I didn't look back, I could feel a pair of cold eyes, lurking beyond thousands of planes, staring fixedly at me, wanting to drag me from this free land back into the graveyard labeled "Love."