In 2025, Shanghai, Lujiazui, on the 37th floor of Yunxiao Tech Building.
The central air conditioner hummed as Chen Mo shoved a cold teriyaki chicken katsu rice ball into his mouth, grease dripping between his knuckles onto the keyboard. In the bottom right corner of the screen, the time ticked to 03:17. Outside the partition of his workstation, the office area was pitch black; only his screen shone like the break of day, dense lines of Python code casting cyan-grey double images across his retinas.
"Thread deadlock again?" came the rustle of a potato chip bag from the next cubicle. Lin, the intern, poked his head out, his dark circles behind his glasses even more striking than the code comments. "Team lead, why does this 'spirit net' project code keep throwing errors? It's like something is deliberately messing with us..."
Without raising his head, Chen Mo used the tip of his tongue to push away a stray bit of rice ball lodged between his molars, his fingertips dancing across the keyboard. "Because the requirement document and the code logic are two skew lines that will never intersect." He hit the Enter key, and the console popped up a new error message—[ERROR] Spirit net node coordinate resolution failed: unknown cultivation technique fluctuation detected.
Lin shrank his neck slightly. "You're talking in jargon again... Why is this project called 'spirit net' anyway? It sounds like something out of a xianxia novel."
"Because upper management felt 'Quantum Entanglement Communication System' wasn't cool enough." Chen Mo loosened his tie; the cooling patch on the back of his neck had long since lost its chill. Three months ago, the company had suddenly launched this top-secret project, demanding that 5G base stations be retrofitted into "spiritual qi nodes." As the backend team lead, he spent every day debugging a pile of code that defied the laws of physics—just like now, running the Dijkstra algorithm to calculate "spiritual vein transmission efficiency."
The computer screensaver suddenly flickered, and within that unchanging star map, a few oracle-bone-like symbols surfaced. Chen Mo blinked, and the symbols transformed back into a data stream and vanished, leaving only the small text in the bottom right corner of the screensaver: Chaos Code Scripture, Volume 1. This was a fragmentary rubbing he had picked up at an antique market last year. Back then, he thought the arrangement of the characters looked remarkably like a recursive algorithm, so he had set it as his screensaver.
His heart gave a sudden, wrenching spasm of pain. Staggering, Chen Mo grabbed the edge of the desk, knocking his thermos to the floor. Brown coffee spilled across the carpet, resembling an abstract map of bloodstains. He saw Lin's terrified face distort in his field of view, heard his panicked shouts for an ambulance, but felt his own consciousness plunging down through the cracks in the keyboard, sinking into the ocean of shimmering code deep within the screen.
"Memory overflow..." he murmured at last, his vision locking onto the error message as the English text suddenly shifted into clear Chinese: [CRITICAL] Host vital signs approaching zero, initiating spacetime anchor program.
Dazzling white light burst across his retinas, mixed with countless fragmented images: a woman in ancient costume pushing him away amidst a sea of fire, a suited man tuning a quantum collider in a laboratory, and himself lying in an ICU bed with an oxygen tube plugged into the back of his hand as the lines on the bedside electrocardiogram monitor gradually flattened...
Boom—
Like the shockwave of a million lines of code executing simultaneously, Chen Mo snapped his eyes open. What hit him was not the smell of disinfectant, but the scent of damp earth and faint sandalwood. Outside the carved bed curtains, candle flames swayed in the night breeze, and a young maid with double-bun hair stood with her back to him, wringing out a towel in a bronze basin. "The young master is finally awake! You gave Chuntao such a fright—you've been unconscious for three days..."
His throat felt as though it were stuffed with thorny code. Chen Mo opened his mouth to speak, but only a hoarse groan emerged. The moment the maid turned around, his pupils contracted sharply—she wore a moon-white coarse-cloth ruqun, and tied at her waist was not an employee ID badge, but a bronze tablet engraved with the characters "Chén Residence."
"Young master?" Chuntao drew closer, her fingertips brushing his forehead before hastily retracting. "Oh, your fever hasn't broken yet! This servant will go fetch the doctor right away..."
"Wait." Chen Mo grabbed her wrist; the tactile feel was far too soft for someone who spent their days clacking on a keyboard. He looked around: a carved wooden bed, blue brick flooring, and on the wall hung a traditional ink landscape painting instead of a display monitor. Through the moonlight leaking past the window, pavilions with flying eaves and bracket sets could be seen in the distance.
Memories rushed in like a tide: Chen Mo, illegitimate son of the Chén Clan, age fifteen, who had suffered a deviation in his cultivation while secretly practicing a family-exclusive technique and was subsequently confined to the west courtyard by his father. And three days ago, the original owner of this body... had already died.
Chuntao felt a sharp sting from his grip, yet she dared not struggle. "Is the young master feeling unwell anywhere? Is it a headache? Or a pain in your chest? Last time you spoke of 'program errors,' even the doctor couldn't understand..."
"Program?" Chen Mo repeated in a murmur, suddenly noticing his hands resting crossed atop the quilt—the skin was delicate, lacking the calluses formed by a computer mouse, though the second joint of his middle finger bore a pale brown callous left behind by the posture of holding a calligraphy brush.
Even more astonishingly, he could "see" a faint stream of light flowing within Chuntao's body, circulating along a certain regular trajectory much like a data stream flowing through code. When he concentrated his mind, a translucent interface materialized across his retinas, with a line of small text pulsing in the upper right corner: [Host awakening detected, loading Code Cultivation System].
"Beep—"
The retinal interface suddenly lit up full-screen as Chen Mo watched rows of golden code emerge from the void, drilling into the center of his brow like chains. Chuntao's cries of alarm grew distant, and amidst a violent headache, he heard a mechanical voice ring out within his sea of consciousness:
"Welcome to the Code Cultivation System, Host Chen Mo. Current timeline: Cultivation World, Earth Era 2025, Parallel Universe Alpha-7. The system is synchronizing the underlying logic of the Chaos Code Scripture. Please maintain consciousness."
The code rushed into his brain like a torrent. Chen Mo bit the tip of his tongue through the blinding pain, the taste of blood snapping him back to awareness. He finally understood why the fragmentary pages of his computer screensaver had seemed so familiar—they were not oracle bone scripts at all, but quantum code written by cultivators using spiritual qi. And he, a 21st-century programmer, was now reborn in this parallel world where technology and xianxia coexisted, in the guise of an illegitimate son of the Chén Clan.
Chuntao's crying voice abruptly shifted pitch: "Young master! Your, your eyes..."
Chen Mo touched his face, his fingertips brushing against wet liquid. He looked down at his palms, where two beads of blood lay reflecting the light and shadow of binary code. At the very bottom of the retinal interface, a red warning flashed:
[WARNING] Tianyan Group quantum surveillance activated. Host must complete the 'Double-Slit Experiment Dao Enlightenment' within 72 hours, or a data purge program will be triggered.
Outside the window, a crane's cry pierced the night sky. Chen Mo looked up. Through the carved window lattice, he caught sight of the skyline in the direction of Lujiazui—it was no longer a modern metropolis bristling with skyscrapers, but several glowing flying skiffs drifting mid-air, their hulls carved with complex runes that traced paths of quantum entanglement across the night sky.
"Lin Xiaoman..." He blurted out the name, his heart aching for no reason. Deep within his memories, a girl with a ponytail smiled at him in a laboratory, half of a spiritual qi crystal poking out of her lab coat pocket, looking remarkably like the throat lozenges he frequently ate.
When Chuntao returned carrying the medicinal bowl, she found her young master standing by the window, the moonlight stretching his shadow long. The youth turned his head to look at her, his eyes reflecting a data stream that belonged to no era of this world, while the corners of his mouth curved into an unburdened smile:
"Chuntao, starting today, teach me how to write with a calligraphy brush."
"Ah? Didn't the young master hate copying the 'Manual on Spiritual Plant Cultivation' the most?"
"Because..." Chen Mo gazed down at his palm, where a particle of spiritual qi was condensing like a pixel point, "what I'm going to write is code that can change the world."