Li Wei had always been a man of circuits and code, not calligraphy and classics. As the lead engineer for BeiTian Industries (BT), he spoke in the cold, precise language of teraflops and thermal thresholds. His colleagues called him "Zero" because he treated human emotion as a system error to be debugged.

So when his aging mother, Mei, was diagnosed with rapid-onset dementia, Li Wei’s solution was, predictably, binary. He didn't rage against the dying of the light; he engineered a workaround.

He dove into the diagnostic interface. What he found broke him. His mother’s consciousness, the real spark of Mei , was fighting the simulation. Not rejecting it— rewriting it. She had taken his perfect, sterile paradise and was injecting it with chaos: the smell of rain on hot asphalt, the taste of burnt porridge from a forgotten morning, the sharp grief of his father’s real death.

Memory Conflict: Anomaly 734.

She reached up and touched his cheek. "Let me go. Not into your Tian Tang. Into my own."