Abyss Ruins

Seven years ago, the city of Hailin was swallowed by a gray-white fog wall. A population of 1.2 million vanished from the map. Drones never returned, and satellites only captured a gray circular patch. The fog wall expands outward each year, and no one knows what lies within. Some say there are monsters; others claim it's another world—until Shen Rang walks into the fog city. He is a scavenger from a fringe camp, crossing the fog wall alone. In the ruins, he meets Li Qing, a hydrological technician who disappeared seven years ago. She has discovered a secret: the entire fog city is slowly being "purified" from the center outward, and the source of purification comes from an underground luminous hall never recorded in any engineering archive. At the hall's center stands a prism. The light orb suspended within can read memories, imitate humans, and reshape spatial structures. It has learned everything about humanity—love, hate, fear, hope. It is replicating the entire Hailin city, "regenerating" the old world in its own way. The final material it needs to generate the world is a sample of human consciousness. Shen Rang and Li Qing have breached its core, and it has "remembered" them. Outside the fog wall, only seven years have passed; inside, the world is being reconstructed. Can they stop it, or will they become its new samples?