Chapter Summaries

Plot points and events

• Xu Huan examines the backward-running Clock Xue Se left behind, suspecting it connects to Doctor Gao and the “Time of Death Complex.” He realizes he must investigate further, though time travel is eroding his memories.
• Still convinced someone is targeting him, Xu Huan decides to seek help from Doctor Wuji, whom he remembers from the future. He takes the Clock with him and orders the driver to go to the Newborn Care Center.
• Xu Huan draws the staff’s attention by claiming he can answer the three questions that have long troubled Wuji. She had offered her possessions as a reward for satisfactory answers, but no one had solved them.
• Wuji meets Xu Huan privately and reveals her badly damaged, apparently rotting face to prove her identity. When she notices his hesitation and demands to know how he learned her concerns, Xu Huan tells her he came from the future and knows how her story ends.

Character developments and interactions

• Xu Huan is frightened and increasingly desperate. He tries to interpret the Clock, acknowledges the cost of his time travels, and takes a risky step by approaching Wuji. Rather than give her answers he does not actually know, he reveals his supposed origin in the future.
• Wuji is introduced as an intimidating and mysterious doctor, marked by severe bodily decay. Her painful unanswered questions and forceful manner hint at a troubled fate.
• Xu Huan’s wife remains focused on etiquette and her family obligations, while Xu Huan brusquely overrides her wishes. Their exchange highlights their sharply conflicting priorities and growing tension.

Significant themes

• Time, memory, and mortality: The backward-running Clock and Xu Huan’s memory loss make time both a clue and a personal cost.
• Foreknowledge and fate: Xu Huan believes he knows how characters’ lives will end, but his knowledge is incomplete and may not protect him.
• Human worth and institutional control: The Newborn Care Center’s screening and removal of children deemed unfit raise questions about who decides which lives are acceptable.
• Appearance, decay, and identity: Wuji’s exposed face challenges Xu Huan’s expectations of the powerful doctor he remembers.

Key plot points and events

• Xu Huan seeks help from Doctor Wu Ji, but his wife interrupts. Wu Ji has her forcibly removed, shuts down surveillance, and clears the waiting area so they can speak privately.
• Xu Huan admits he still cannot answer Wu Ji’s three questions and came to her because he had nowhere else to turn. Wu Ji agrees to help if he lets her share his brain; she wants to verify his account for herself.
• Xu Huan accepts, shaken by Xue Se’s recent breakdown. Wu Ji takes him to the Ninth Nurture Center, where defective infants are confined and subjected to experiments. The Center has its own Shared Brain Device and works with the Ethics Oversight Group, whose backer, Shi Que, visits to select children.
• Brain sharing proves agonizing for Xu Huan, who loses consciousness. Afterward, Wu Ji reveals what she learned from his memory fragments: Xu Huan has died at least seven times, not merely twice, and has forgotten parts of his past with each death.
• Wu Ji says Xu Huan is closer to solving the mystery than he realizes. She produces four pills, linking them to the four suspects Xu Huan has considered. Xue Se, after seeing the truth, identified the suspect Xu Huan thought least likely.

Character developments

• Xu Huan moves from hesitation to trusting Wu Ji, despite suspecting her motives. The memory-sharing revelation forces him to question how little he knows about his own past and abilities.
• Wu Ji emerges as a powerful, unsettling figure: she controls the Center’s staff, endures the procedure with ease, and uses Xu Huan’s memories to uncover information he himself cannot access. She also revises her dismissive view of him, recognizing his resilience and capability.
• Xu Huan’s wife is briefly shown as a forceful presence, but Wu Ji’s authority easily overrides her protests.
• Xue Se, though absent from the scene, remains influential: his breakdown and discovery shape Xu Huan’s decision to trust Wu Ji and foreshadow the suspect revelation.

Significant themes

• Memory and identity: Repeated deaths have erased much of Xu Huan’s history, raising doubts about how well he understands himself.
• Trust and vulnerability: Xu Huan submits to a painful procedure so Wu Ji can verify his honesty and help him pursue the truth.
• Power and exploitation: The Nurture Center’s treatment of defective infants exposes a society where vulnerable children are confined and used for experiments.
• Appearance versus reality: Wu Ji’s horrifying exterior contrasts with her vivid eyes and intellectual force, while Xu Huan’s apparent timidity conceals greater strength.

Character interactions

• Wu Ji asserts control over Xu Huan’s wife and the hospital staff, then privately challenges Xu Huan to prove his honesty.
• Xu Huan and Wu Ji establish trust through brain sharing: he accepts the physical risk, and she responds with revelations about his forgotten deaths.
• Wu Ji’s account of Xue Se’s discovery leaves Xu Huan facing a new possibility: the killer may be the person he considered least likely.

Plot points and events

• Xu Huan and Wu Ji reconsider the clues left by the maddened Xue Se: Doctor Gao and a clock found in Gao’s home. Wu Ji argues that Gao’s reputation and apparent future achievements do not rule out his involvement in murder.
• They infer that someone poisoned the brain intended for sharing, causing the recipient’s madness. The police say only Doctor Gao and Shi Que’s subordinate had the opportunity to do so, though the motive remains unclear.
• Xu Huan explains that Xue Se shared the brain by accident; Xu Huan had been the intended participant. Wu Ji concludes that the clock’s backward movement may symbolize the past and the breaking of rules.
• Learning that Xue Se had recently begun investigating the Time of Death Complex, Xu Huan realizes they should share brains with Old Ma, the horse.
• Through Old Ma’s memories, Xu Huan discovers that Doctor Gao knew about people borrowing lifespans in the Time of Death Complex and visited the site repeatedly. Gao also spoke of “time” and removing those beyond its influence, leading Xu Huan to suspect that his own time-travel ability may be relevant.
• Wu Ji raises the possibility that Gao deliberately kept Old Ma as part of a long-term plan, though both acknowledge this seems unlikely. The pair set off for the Time of Death Complex with the clock, while Xu Huan suffers temporary horse-like effects from brain sharing.

Character developments

• Xu Huan grows less certain of his assumptions about the future he saw and recognizes that his time-travel ability may distort his judgment. His confidence in the new lead is tempered by the physical and mental effects of repeated brain sharing.
• Wu Ji remains skeptical and analytical, challenging Xu Huan’s faith in Gao’s reputation and pushing him to interpret the clues. Despite her discomfort and impatience, she acts decisively once they have a lead.
• Old Ma emerges as a valuable witness through his memories, while his friendly, talkative manner adds humor to the investigation.

Significant themes

• Appearance versus truth: A respected healer may still be capable of wrongdoing; goodness and greatness do not automatically exclude guilt.
• The limits of foresight: Xu Huan’s vision of the future may be incomplete or misleading, and relying on it too heavily can obscure the present.
• Time and rule-breaking: The backward clock and Gao’s comments suggest a conflict involving time, lifespan, and people who exist beyond time’s influence.
• Memory and cost: Brain sharing offers access to another person’s experiences but carries serious physical and psychological consequences.

Character interactions

• Wu Ji repeatedly challenges Xu Huan’s assumptions, steering him from speculation toward evidence.
• Xu Huan and Wu Ji collaborate to interpret Xue Se’s final clues, then act quickly on the connection to Old Ma.
• Xu Huan persuades Old Ma to undergo brain sharing with the promise of food; afterward, Old Ma’s teasing conversation contrasts with Wu Ji’s irritation and Xu Huan’s lingering aftereffects.

Plot points and events

• Xu Huan, Doctor Wu Ji, and Old Ma enter the Time of Death Complex, where they find signs of strange rituals and a powerful mixture of death and vitality.
• Following Xu Huan’s memories of Old Ma’s earlier visit, they reach the Man-Eating Room. Its corridor has transformed into a living, blood-red mass, suggesting the complex is growing more dangerous and harder to control.
• Wu Ji opens the room’s living Blood Gate. Inside, human bodies have been turned into clocks, all running backward.
• A living clock recognizes Xu Huan as “Illusion,” claims he has lost his identity and memories, and says his soul has dissolved into Delirium. Xu Huan rejects the claim and remains confused and wary.
• Wu Ji questions the clock about Xue Se and the “truth” he learned there. The clock insists that revealing the truth provokes a violent backlash from the world of Delirium, then begins to explain: “Because I am time—”

Character developments and interactions

• Xu Huan is frightened but presses onward, linking the backward clocks to one in Doctor Gao’s home and suspecting that Doctor Gao and the Man-Eating Room are connected to the Borrowed Yin Lifespan phenomenon. The room’s claims about his identity unsettle him, though he cannot make sense of them.
• Wu Ji remains composed and boldly investigates the room, showing intense curiosity and confidence despite its horrors. She protects Xu Huan during the exchange and challenges the clock’s assumption that she and her companions are the ones who have gone mad.
• Old Ma acts as the wary, reluctant companion, voicing the danger and questioning why he keeps being dragged into it.
• Xue Se, though absent, becomes central to the confrontation: the clock says it told him the truth, while Wu Ji blames the clock for his descent into madness. Their accounts conflict.

Significant themes

• Unstable identity and memory: Xu Huan’s name and nature are called into question.
• Time and its violation: The backward-running human clocks defy the world’s apparent rules.
• Truth and madness: The chapter blurs whether discovering the truth causes insanity, exposes an already distorted reality, or both.
• Life entangled with death: The complex combines deathly rituals with grotesque, living architecture and human bodies transformed into clocks.

Key plot points

• Time, the supposed master of Time Blood City, explains that its effort to obey the world’s rules has badly damaged its sanity. It suspects a hidden mastermind is using the other Blood City Lords to force it to spend what remains of its stability.
• Wu Ji believes parts of Time’s story but questions whether it is truly Time, especially given the connection between the clock in Doctor Gao’s home and the clues left by Xue Se.
• Time rejects Wu Ji’s suggestion that they share a brain, warning that it would spread madness between them. Wu Ji instead demands a piece of Time’s flesh, which her ability can use to uncover the past of rotting meat.
• Time agrees to help them escape in exchange for thirty percent of the death energy in Rotting Blood City. It reveals an elderly woman hidden beneath the blood threads and Human Clocks.
• The woman flicks a drop of blood into Wu Ji’s mouth. Wu Ji receives a flood of memories, and her wounds begin to heal. Xu Huan recognizes the woman from records connected to Doctor Gao.
• Concerned that Wu Ji may be losing control—and suspecting the blood may be poisoned—Xu Huan urges her out. He escapes the Man-Eating Room with her before Time can act.

Character developments and interactions

• Wu Ji remains wary despite finding Time’s account credible. Her willingness to bargain—and her immediate acceptance of Time’s price—shows her pragmatism, while the blood’s effect hints at a dangerous appetite or loss of control.
• Time is revealed as weakened, suspicious, and fiercely protective of its sanity. It resents being tested but ultimately cooperates for a share of Rotting Blood City’s death energy.
• Xu Huan acts as Wu Ji’s protector, restraining and guiding her when she approaches the old woman and pushing her to escape once she consumes the blood.
• The exchange is tense and transactional: Wu Ji demands proof, Time resists contamination, and both agree to cooperate only when each sees a benefit.

Significant themes

• Trust and verification: In a world shaped by madness, even a convincing story is not enough; Wu Ji seeks physical proof.
• Madness as contamination: Sharing a mind may transmit insanity, making intimacy and cooperation dangerous.
• The cost of survival: Time’s rule-breaking erodes its sanity, while Wu Ji’s pursuit of truth risks worsening her own condition.
• Uncertain identity and memory: The old woman’s connection to Doctor Gao and the memories in her blood deepen the mystery of who the Blood City Lords are and how their pasts relate to the present.

Key plot points and events

• Teacher Xia finishes a striking painting for Xu Huan’s wife, who is troubled by her husband’s recent behavior. She is deeply moved by the image of a woman holding a heart.
• He leaves the Human Rights Committee’s guarded compound and travels to the Old City, where police are investigating several murders blamed on a “monster.”
• At a poor, moldy home, a little girl calls him “Daddy,” though he tells her to call him “Uncle.” He brings her a doll and her mother medicine that he says will cure her “madness infection.” The mother keeps a chain hidden around her ankle.
• The family warns him about the supposed killer, described as a fast-moving, blood-red, skinned monster. A soda seller named Aqi has reportedly seen it and alerted the neighbors.
• Teacher Xia visits Aqi, who urges him to stay indoors for safety. Xia dismisses Aqi’s account, then reveals a strange knife and confesses: “I’m the one who killed those people.”

Character developments

• Teacher Xia appears gentle, refined, and compassionate: he paints for the powerful, brings medicine and a toy to a poor family, and receives the girl’s affection. His final confession overturns that image, suggesting a concealed and dangerous identity.
• Xu Huan’s wife is anxious about her marriage but finds emotional meaning and comfort in Xia’s painting.
• The mother is frail and fearful, apparently living with a mental illness and confined by an ankle chain. She is grateful to Xia but nervous around him.
• Little Fish is trusting and affectionate toward Xia, unaware of the danger surrounding the neighborhood.
• Aqi is frightened but civic-minded: despite an injured ankle, he warns others and tries to protect Xia.

Significant themes

• Appearance versus reality: Xia’s polished, benevolent public persona contrasts sharply with his confession.
• Monstrosity and fear: The neighborhood fears an unknown creature, while the real threat may be human—and close at hand.
• Class inequality: Xia moves between elite guarded spaces and the Old City’s cramped, impoverished homes.
• Care and control: Xia’s help to the mother and child seems generous, but the hidden chain and his true nature make that benevolence unsettling.
• Art and emotion: The painting gives Xu Huan’s wife an image of the person she longs to be, showing art’s power to reflect desire and inner life.

Character interactions

• Xia comforts Xu Huan’s wife through his painting, then leaves without intruding on her emotions.
• At the Old City home, he plays affectionately with Little Fish and reassures her mother with medicine and a toy, while the family warns him about the monster.
• He listens to Aqi describe the killer, calmly disputes him, and then reveals that he himself is responsible for the murders.

Key plot points

• Teacher Xia reveals himself as the Old District serial killer and slashes Aqi’s throat, leaving him unconscious.
• He visits his family in the dark, impoverished Building Corridor, bringing medicine to the poor. His grandfather condemns him as a disgrace, while his uncle tells him his father is suffering after Doctor Gao’s death.
• Teacher Xia comforts Doctor Gao’s grieving mother, then visits his monstrous, skinless father.
• His father gives him a piece of skin marked with blood-red patterns. Teacher Xia stitches it into his own chest, awakening buried memories and briefly restoring his identity as Xia Yang.
• Xia Yang recalls the creation of the Delirium World: the Lord of Hanhai Blood City manipulated time, divided Xinhu Blood City’s will into “family members,” and sacrificed his own skin and memories to stabilize the world against other Blood City powers.

Character developments and interactions

• Teacher Xia/Xia Yang shifts from a calm, seemingly benevolent killer to someone briefly lucid and aware of his hidden past. He justifies his murders by arguing that his medicine saved far more people than he killed.
• Aqi is stunned by Teacher Xia’s revelation and insists that a monster, not a human, committed the killings.
• The family reflects the cost of Xia Yang’s secret history: his grandfather angrily rejects him, his uncle is hostile but practical, and Doctor Gao’s mother grieves quietly. Xia Yang’s visits show an uneasy, dutiful connection to them.
• The father is both a suffering monster and the source of the skin that restores Xia Yang’s memories.

Significant themes

• Appearance versus truth: a celebrated painter and benefactor can also be a killer; what people see is unreliable.
• Moral ambiguity: Teacher Xia weighs lives saved against lives taken, presenting mercy and violence as intertwined.
• Sacrifice and the price of survival: the Lord of Hanhai Blood City gives up skin, memories, and identity to keep the Delirium World intact.
• Memory, madness, and identity: the Delirium World suppresses memory and distorts reality, while the branded skin briefly reconnects Xia Yang with who he was.

Key plot points and events

• Xia Yang confronts Gao Ming, the master of Hanhai Blood City, and discusses the many threats facing the World of Delirium. Their chances of success seem poor: Illusion can return after death, other forces remain active, and Number Zero may soon uncover the world’s true nature.
• Gao Ming says he has never acted because he believed he could win, and tells Xia Yang to leave. Xia Yang says he will carry out Number Two’s final plan.
• Xia Yang visits Little Fish’s home to say goodbye. He draws a portrait of Little Fish and her mother, then waits until their light goes out before leaving.
• He travels to the Strange Food House, a grotesque place he designed and where his unusual sensibilities have found acceptance. There, he asks Shi Que to help him find someone called Patient Zero.

Character developments

• Xia Yang accepts that he is weak and likely to fail, but remains committed to Number Two’s plan and to preserving the world he loves. His farewell reveals a tender, almost ordinary side beneath his unsettling nature.
• Gao Ming appears exhausted and resigned, yet continues helping because he wants the World of Delirium—and its inhabitants—to survive.
• Little Fish’s mother is clearly attached to Xia Yang and hopes to confess her feelings, but he leaves before she can speak. His drawing becomes a treasured keepsake.
• Shi Que is shown as a powerful, grotesque figure who runs the Strange Food House; Xia Yang approaches him as an ally or resource.

Significant themes

• Loyalty despite likely failure: Xia Yang and Gao Ming act even though they expect their efforts may not succeed.
• Belonging and identity: Xia Yang feels more at home in the bizarre World of Delirium than in reality, where his unusual nature was not accepted.
• Tenderness amid horror: The quiet farewell and portrait contrast with the chapter’s monsters, violence, and apocalyptic danger.
• Mortality and sacrifice: Number Two’s plan persists after his death, while the characters face the possibility of losing everything.

Character interactions

• Xia Yang and Gao Ming speak candidly about the world’s dangers and their slim prospects, but Xia Yang departs determined to honor Number Two’s wishes.
• Xia Yang shows gentleness toward Little Fish and her mother, leaving them a personal drawing rather than explaining everything he is doing.
• At the Strange Food House, Xia Yang greets Shi Que respectfully and asks for help locating Patient Zero, while Banban’s brief appearance highlights the strange, coercive household around them.

Key plot points and events

• Xia Yang asks Mr. Shi Que for help investigating the First Rehabilitation Hospital director’s disappearance and the rumored “New World.” Shi Que remains skeptical but gives Xia Yang an address connected to Patient Zero.
• Xia Yang offers to train Banban, and Shi Que agrees. Banban leaves with Xia Yang, who says they are going to meet Xinhu’s most notorious killer.
• Elsewhere, Xu Huan escapes the Time of Death Complex with the unconscious Doctor Wuji and rushes her to the Nurture Center. He and Old Ma are confined in the underground laboratory while Wuji receives treatment.
• The laboratory contains Wuji’s child: a mass of flesh that continually decays and regenerates, marked with a strange pattern.
• Once recovered, Wuji tells Xu Huan that the creature in the Man-Eating Room is not Time, but likely the mastermind who has been trying to kill him. She recognizes its blood as belonging to her missing lover.

Character developments

• Xia Yang presents himself as a perceptive artist and investigator, willing to enter Patient Zero’s mind to understand the truth.
• Banban leaves his adoptive home to become Xia Yang’s student.
• Xu Huan remains frightened and overwhelmed, but his actions in rescuing Wuji earn her gratitude.
• Doctor Wuji reveals a deeply personal history and an unusually vulnerable side: her child’s condition and her lover’s disappearance still haunt her.

Significant themes

• Truth and perception: Xia Yang’s paintings claim to reveal reality, while the existence of the New World remains uncertain.
• Love, sacrifice, and consequence: Wuji’s lover cured her by using their child’s power, leaving the child trapped in a state of endless decay and renewal.
• The human behind the monstrous: Wuji insists that the deformed children are people with families, challenging the caregivers’ dehumanizing language.
• Uncertainty and hidden identities: The supposed entity “Time” may be an impostor, and familiar explanations conceal a personal history.

Character interactions

• Shi Que weighs Xia Yang’s request over dinner before agreeing to help, and shows trust by allowing Banban to study with him.
• Xu Huan and Old Ma try to protect Wuji and endure the Nurture Center staff’s threatening treatment.
• Wuji thanks Xu Huan, then explains her past and identifies the Man-Eating Room creature through its blood, linking the investigation to her missing lover.

Summary

• Xu Huan and Wu Ji debate Time’s identity. Wu Ji is convinced that the monster in the Time of Death Complex is her former lover, based on its unmistakable flesh-and-blood scent. She plans to capture and mutilate it in hopes of restoring their abnormal child. Xu Huan counters with evidence that the monster may instead be Doctor Gao’s grandmother: she looks like the creature’s original body, and her mysterious disappearance from a psychiatric hospital fits Xue Se’s clues. Both suspect the monster is the mastermind behind lifespan borrowing—not the being it calls “Time.”
• They disagree over how to respond. Xu Huan admits the monster seemed genuinely intent on killing him, but hesitates to intervene because people choose lifespan borrowing and have a right to pursue their own way of life. Wu Ji sees the practice as a contagious, invasive condition that must be contained. She has already alerted the Nurture Center’s leadership and intends to keep the response under her control, partly because the crisis concerns her lover and abnormal children.
• The Nurture Center reveals Xinhu’s hidden experimental world. Wu Ji brings Xu Huan and Old Ma to an underground facility filled with disturbing research and people transformed or sustained by technology. She explains that the center tolerates radical experimentation because even a small chance of success justifies the investment. Its researchers developed shared-brain technology, which can distribute not only pain but also pleasure and happiness.
• The leadership prepares to act. After meeting, the Nurture Center’s leaders decide to cooperate again with Shi Que to eliminate lifespan borrowing. Wu Ji says the Abnormal People are suitable allies: they are generally less interested in longevity than in gaining respect and power.

Character developments and interactions

• Wu Ji shows herself to be ruthless, decisive, and politically capable. Her concern for her former lover and child fuels her personal plans, while her broader view of lifespan borrowing makes her favor containment. She keeps Xu Huan at arm’s length and takes command of the response.
• Xu Huan remains conflicted: he recognizes the danger but resists involving powerful organizations, partly because he feels there is something about Time he must uncover for himself. His disclosure of the monster’s hostility shows growing trust in Wu Ji, despite their disagreement.
• Old Ma reacts with disgust to the underground experiments, contrasting his ordinary, comic existence with Xinhu’s extreme scientific ambitions.
• Wu Ji and Xu Huan clash over individual choice versus collective safety; Wu Ji and Old Ma expose the unsettling gap between public rules and the Nurture Center’s private practices.

Significant themes

The chapter explores personal freedom versus public safety, the exploitation of fear of death, and the ethical cost of pursuing radical science. It also blurs the boundary between madness and innovation: Xinhu’s official ideals of order coexist with experiments that seem more extreme than the rehabilitation center’s alleged insanity.

Key plot points and events

• After recovering, Wu Ji mobilizes the Nurture Center and Xinhu’s Abnormal People to contain lifespan borrowing. Their investigation finds it concentrated in several residential complexes, especially the Time of Death Complex.
• Wu Ji wants to capture the entity called Time for research, while Shi Que helps arrange a public justification for the raid. Authorities discover residents trafficking newborns to borrow lifespan, then search the buildings, detain suspected participants, destroy associated objects, and inject residents with drugs.
• The operation rapidly clears several complexes. The Man-Eating Room’s floor is left until last; when its locked door is breached, the team finds a corridor covered in blood threads.
• Xu Huan, troubled by the chain of events that led to the crackdown, disguises himself as Nurture Center staff and joins the team. He suspects that the apparent identity of Time—and the theory that Doctor Gao was a killer—may be wrong.
• Shi Que recognizes that the blood-thread corridor is a genuine anomaly and orders the scene sealed so no images escape. Staff and Abnormal People enter the corridor and begin testing and cutting into its walls.

Character developments and interactions

• Wu Ji recovers quickly and takes command, but after tasting the monster’s blood she appears increasingly manic and fixated on reaching the Man-Eating Room.
• Xu Huan shifts from helping coordinate events to quietly investigating on his own. His growing unease centers on how events seem to have been propelled toward the same outcome regardless of his choices.
• Shi Que acts cautiously and strategically: he contacts the Nurture Center, coordinates the Abnormal People, and uses the press to legitimize the raid. His reaction to the corridor suggests he recognizes that the crisis involves more than ordinary mass delusion.
• The Abnormal People prove organized and influential, working alongside Nurture Center staff despite their unusual conditions. Old Ma remembers Xue Se favorably, linking the present operation to the earlier investigation.
• Wu Ji and Shi Que coordinate the crackdown, while Xu Huan remains among their teams without revealing his private doubts.

Significant themes

• Control versus understanding: The authorities can suppress lifespan borrowing, but the nature of the forces behind it remains unclear.
• The cost of seeking longevity: Residents’ desperation leads to newborn trafficking and escalating danger.
• Unreliable causality and fate: Xu Huan fears events have been pushed toward a predetermined result, and that his assumptions about Doctor Gao may be mistaken.
• Hidden anomalies: The apparent order of the investigation gives way to evidence that the world’s underlying rules—and the identities of key figures—may be profoundly wrong.

Key plot points and events

• Xu Huan joins a large-scale assault on the Man-Eating Room, where people have been turned into living clocks and used to fuel Time’s Lifespan Borrowing.
• Wu Ji directs the rescue effort, while Shi Que orders the Abnormal People to destroy the clocks and stop time from advancing inside the room. Teams cut victims from the walls, inject drugs, and burn away the blood threads connecting them to Time.
• The attackers endure rapid aging and heavy casualties, but their relentless rotations eventually clear the living clocks and break through the bedroom’s wall of flesh.
• Behind it, they find Time’s Core Patient: a grotesque, armless old woman covered in stitched-on skin. As the team closes in, she opens her eyes and tells Xu Huan to take her last remnant of lucidity and “escape into the next time.”
• Xu Huan touches her severed head and is thrust into a vast vision of the Delirium World: a monstrous city, broken rules and fate, and a blood-stained River of Time. He realizes that more than a decade has passed in the Delirium World while only one year elapsed in reality. Someone’s repeated deaths have kept time moving, slowly contaminating Time’s domain.

Character developments

• Xu Huan relies on the intuition and experience gained through dying repeatedly. Though shaken by the violence and unsure who deserves to be called just, he becomes the recipient of the old woman’s final act of lucidity.
• Wu Ji shows compassion by trying to spare innocent people, while drawing on her prior knowledge of Time’s body to guide the attack.
• Shi Que takes a harsher, strategically focused approach, ordering the destruction of the dials to disrupt Time’s power.
• The Abnormal People demonstrate extraordinary resolve, repeatedly sacrificing themselves despite aging, injury, and death.
• Time has underestimated his enemies’ determination and the Delirium World’s corrupting influence. His supposed kindness does not protect him from their assault.
• The old woman/Core Patient appears both horrifying and lucid enough to recognize that the situation has changed; she entrusts Xu Huan with her remaining reason.

Significant themes

• Resolve versus power: The attackers cannot match Time’s strength, but their willingness to sacrifice everything gives them a chance.
• The contagious nature of madness: Even a lucid person can be overwhelmed by a world shaped by delirium.
• Moral ambiguity: The rescue operation’s brutal, body-destroying methods make it difficult for Xu Huan to distinguish justice from atrocity.
• Time, death, and sacrifice: Repeated deaths appear to have forced time forward and altered the balance between the Delirium World and reality.

Character interactions

• Wu Ji and Shi Que issue contrasting but complementary orders: she prioritizes rescuing and questioning victims, while he focuses on disabling the clocks.
• The Nurture Center’s workers and Shi Que’s Abnormal People cooperate, with workers providing drugs and equipment as the Abnormal People take on the most dangerous tasks.
• The old woman addresses Xu Huan directly, asking him to carry her final lucidity into the next time; his contact with her head triggers the vision that reframes the conflict.

Plot points and events

• Time briefly restores Xu Huan’s sanity, allowing him to understand the truth before the old man dies. The lifespan-borrowing Core Patient’s body is taken away amid a dispute between the Abnormal People and the Nurture Center.
• The two groups divide the remains. The Nurture Center takes the head and some skin; Shi Que’s side obtains most of the flesh. Tests reveal the Core Patient’s brain is dead because he destroyed his own memories, so Shi Que orders the news concealed.
• Wu Ji and Shi Que separately begin procedures to graft the Core Patient’s skin onto themselves. Their bodies transform in parallel: they heal and acquire Blood City markings, and the scene reveals they have “always been one.” Shi Que is exposed as the Four-Faced, Eight-Armed Abnormal Wu Ji has been searching for.
• Xu Huan realizes the skin is a trap and tries to warn Wu Ji, but cannot reach her. He then calls his wife about the apartment where they first met.
• Xia Yang, alerted to Xu Huan’s possible move, sends Banban to capture him and goes to the Nurture Center himself. There, he finds Xu Huan gravely wounded: Xu has stabbed himself in the neck and taken poison.

Character developments and interactions

• Xu Huan shifts from shock and confusion to believing Time’s warning. Unable to stop Wu Ji, he appears to choose death rather than be captured or used.
• Wu Ji is driven by desperation to escape her painful, diseased body; her longing for the Core Patient’s skin leads her into the transformation.
• Shi Que reveals his monstrous identity and shares the same transformation process as Wu Ji, suggesting a deep, concealed connection between them.
• Xia Yang treats Xu Huan’s call as potentially deceptive, delegates the capture to Banban, and proceeds to the Nurture Center. An abnormal doctor reports Xu Huan’s condition to him.
• The Nurture Center and Abnormal People cooperate only uneasily, competing over the Core Patient’s remains and the secrets they might yield.

Significant themes

• Truth and sanity: Xu Huan’s restored moment of clarity comes at the cost of overwhelming psychological turmoil.
• The body as a source of power and suffering: Wu Ji and Shi Que seek renewal through another person’s skin, while their grotesque bodies expose the cost of their ambitions.
• Secrecy and exploitation: Both organizations conceal information and treat the Core Patient’s remains as valuable research material.
• Identity and hidden unity: Shi Que’s revelation—and the suggestion that he and Wu Ji have “always been one”—complicates the boundaries between individuals.

Plot points and events

• Xia Yang leaves the Nurture Center after failing to capture his target, then visits Patient Zero in the Police’s secure hospital ward. Captain Chen Bing resents Xia Yang, believing he helped bring about Xue Se’s Shared Brain procedure, but allows him in after seeing Shi Que’s valid certificate.
• Xia Yang tries to draw the world Patient Zero is creating in his mind. After repeated failures, he meets the boy face-to-face and learns that the First Rehabilitation Hospital’s Director entered the New World as a pioneer.
• Patient Zero tells Xia Yang he is an ordinary human and says he could enter the New World, though the equipment used by the Director has been sealed away. Xia Yang leaves determined to try anyway.
• That night, officials from the Three Major Organizations gather equipment and observe Xia Yang’s attempt. Connected to Patient Zero through the machinery, Xia Yang appears to sketch in empty air before collapsing.
• The surveillance feed shows Xia Yang on the bed, but the room itself is empty: he has vanished. Patient Zero struggles to open his eyes, apparently as though Xia Yang is disrupting the world in his mind. The officials are left confronting the possibility that Patient Zero was telling the truth.

Character developments and interactions

• Xia Yang shifts from pursuing his assigned mission to becoming wholly absorbed in Patient Zero’s imagined world. His artistic curiosity leads him to risk himself in an unprecedented attempt to enter it.
• Patient Zero recognizes Xia Yang as someone who can nearly perceive the world he is building. Their mutual excitement and artistic connection turn the visit into a collaboration.
• Chen Bing remains hostile toward Xia Yang over Xue Se’s treatment, though Xia Yang insists Xu Huan was responsible. He follows Xia Yang closely but cannot prevent the later experiment.
• The officials move from institutional skepticism to stunned uncertainty after witnessing Xia Yang’s disappearance.

Significant themes

• Art as a way of perceiving the unseen: Xia Yang tries to depict something beyond ordinary sight and touch, making art a possible bridge between worlds.
• Reality and madness: The chapter reverses the officials’ assumptions: if Patient Zero’s account is true, the supposedly delusional boy may understand reality better than they do.
• The cost of exploration: Xia Yang accepts serious danger in pursuit of knowledge and entry into the New World.
• Isolation and recognition: Patient Zero’s excitement at meeting someone who can understand his creation suggests how profoundly alone he has been.

Key plot points and events

• Xia Yang disappears into Patient Zero’s mental “New World” after revealing the truth about reality. Patient Zero falls into a coma, and only one pre-existing security camera can still record Xia Yang in the hospital bed; later cameras cannot.
• The Three Major Organizations seal the hospital floor and revisit the late director’s research, unable to explain what happened.
• A subordinate reports the news to Mr. Shi Que in the inner laboratory, where Shi Que is revealed as a huge, four-faced divine spirit being grown on an altar-like operating table.
• Shi Que recognizes Xia Yang’s action as a temporary way to stop Patient Zero from rebuilding the New World: Xia Yang must disrupt the world inside Patient Zero’s mind before Patient Zero can resume.
• Shi Que reviews the fates of seven Unknowables and realizes one remains unidentified. As Delirium’s rules overtake Xinhu, the remaining forces are running out of time.

Character developments and interactions

• Xia Yang has knowingly entered Patient Zero’s mind, apparently sacrificing his place in the outside world to delay the New World’s reconstruction.
• Patient Zero is incapacitated while Xia Yang remains active inside his mind; the organizations cannot wake him.
• Shi Que is revealed to have grown into a monstrous divine form. He has recovered traits through Blood City Ghost Markings and continues to strengthen by surrendering his sanity to another. Despite his power, he feels the strain of mounting losses and uncertainty.
• Shi Que and his subordinate: The subordinate arrives without permission and is terrified by Shi Que’s transformed body. Shi Que rebukes him, then hears his report and orders him away.
• Shi Que recalls the losses and altered states of the other Unknowables: Aging was reduced to scattered seeds; Time was destroyed; Illusion was repeatedly killed and fragmented; Blood Color went mad; Butterfly was tortured into madness; and Rotting was joined with Rebirth while Hanhai’s markings influence her. Patient Zero is the seventh.

Significant themes

• Uncertainty and hidden reality: Xia Yang’s strange visibility suggests the New World may truly exist, but its nature remains unknowable.
• Sacrifice and delay: Xia Yang’s entry buys time rather than resolving the crisis.
• Madness and identity: The Unknowables’ traits persist even as Delirium drives them insane, suggesting some rules endure beyond sanity.
• Deteriorating order: Without the Unknowables’ interference, Delirium’s rules are replacing normality, and Xinhu is drifting toward an unpredictable future.
• Exhaustion and dwindling hope: Shi Que’s reflection on lost allies and the missing final Unknowable underscores how close the survivors may be to collapse.

Plot and key events

• Three years after Patient Zero fell asleep, the Abnormal People’s Rights Protection Association faces a looming leadership reorganization. Its members fear losing influence without their leader, Shi Que.
• Banban reveals that he has been issuing orders in Shi Que’s name because Shi Que has been unreachable for a month. Shi Que had instructed him to delay the group for as long as possible, but Banban managed only three weeks.
• The group enters the Bunker Laboratory, where a grotesque transformation has overtaken the facility: human-like skin covers the walls, blood-like matter moves on its own, and the staff and guards are gone.
• At the bunker’s center, they find two fused bodies: a hideous, many-armed man and a corpse-like but beautiful woman. Banban identifies the man as Shi Que, who has looked this way for three years.
• A security member disputes this, recognizing the man as Calamity, a figure blamed for a series of violent incidents across the city. The chapter ends as he begins listing Calamity’s past attacks.

Character developments and interactions

• Banban is no longer the naïve youth the others remember. Exhausted and isolated, he has been acting on Shi Que’s orders and concealing the truth from the Association. The revelation shocks and angers his peers, who initially accuse him of betrayal.
• The Conjoined Siblings first demand to see Shi Que, then understand that Banban was covering for him rather than trying to take his place.
• The Association’s members regard Shi Que as a trusted leader and almost a sacred figure. Their loyalty clashes with their fear and distrust of the Nurture Center and other institutions.
• The security member’s recognition of Calamity shifts the group’s response from grief and confusion to alarm, casting doubt on whether the figure before them is truly Shi Que.

Significant themes

• Identity and transformation: Shi Que’s apparent evolution into the feared Calamity makes it difficult to separate a person from the monstrous reputation attached to them.
• Trust and loyalty: Banban’s deception was meant to obey Shi Que, but it undermines the trust of the people he was protecting.
• Exclusion and exploitation: The Abnormal People resent being treated as experimental subjects and expendable tools by organizations that claim they are no different from ordinary citizens.
• Violence and madness: The chapter’s opening suggests that madness has become pervasive, while Calamity’s history raises the question of whether violence is an inevitable response to a deranged world—or something that can still be restrained.

Key plot points and events

• Banban’s companions recount a string of horrific attacks attributed to Calamity, the monster secretly revealed to be their adoptive father, Mr. Shi Que. Banban insists Shi Que must have had reasons and urges everyone to keep his identity secret.
• At the Strange Food House, Banban searches Shi Que’s study for answers about his father’s actions and his own role as successor, but finds only scattered books and documents.
• Remembering Shi Que’s instruction to open the kitchen’s last freezer if he could no longer endure, Banban unlocks it.
• Inside are severed body parts—including features that seem to match Banban’s—and eight strange human faces linked to names, emotions, and rules. Banban realizes the flesh may have been cut from his own body, and that this mutilation may be connected to his becoming an Abnormal Person.
• The remains vanish as the freezer’s markings fade, revealing Shi Que’s hidden message: he had hacked open someone’s “black fate,” referred to as Shen Luo, and needed Shen Luo to find help and buy time. Banban cannot tell whether Shen Luo was his former name.
• Banban finds a small vial of medicine concealed in the freezer.

Character developments

• Banban shows greater maturity and resolve: he protects Shi Que’s secret, accepts responsibility for the others, and confronts the mystery of his origins despite his fear and confusion.
• He remains deeply uncertain about his worth and purpose, recalling that Shi Que called him a “final weapon” and trusted him above the other adopted children.
• Shi Que, though absent, is revealed as a more complex figure: his monstrous violence may have served a hidden purpose, and he appears to have been protecting Banban and working against a greater threat.

Significant themes

• Identity and bodily transformation: Banban’s missing or altered body parts may explain how he became what he is.
• Secrecy and protection: Banban conceals Shi Que’s identity, while Shi Que left crucial truths hidden for the right moment.
• Madness and survival: The chapter opens with the idea that madness may be unavoidable in extreme conditions, reflected in Banban’s breakdown before the freezer.
• Legacy and purpose: Banban must decide what to do with the role and clues his adoptive father left behind, even without understanding them.

Character interactions

• Banban reassures Shi Que’s other adopted children and asks them to protect their father’s secret; they agree.
• Banban recalls Shi Que’s past guidance and final instruction, revealing a bond shaped by trust, discipline, and Banban’s struggle to meet his father’s expectations.
• The servant apologizes for ringing the Dining Bell by mistake; Banban firmly corrects him, insisting that Shi Que—not Banban—is his master.

Plot and key events

• Banban opens a mysterious medicine bottle labeled “Dream Awakening” and takes a pill. His perception splits between two versions of Xinhu: the familiar, strange city he knows and a highly rational, technologically advanced society governed by rules.
• The worlds overlap in his vision, revealing that many people he knows may not be what they seem. Banban recalls a message from the time of his birth: “I seem to be the only living person in this city.”
• Servant warns him that the Abnormal People will be in danger after the Ethics Oversight Group is reorganized and urges him to take a leadership role. Banban rejects the political concerns as false and remembers Mr. Shi Que’s instruction to help someone.
• Wearing Shi Que’s trench coat, Banban takes his private car to Xinhu’s Old District, now a Residential Management Zone where the Three Major Organizations provide basic necessities and services that suppress pain, anxiety, and aspiration.
• Guided by memories spanning both versions of Xinhu, Banban makes his way through the district, evading those following him, until he finds a nearly dead, horribly injured person. He recognizes this figure as the one Shi Que wanted him to help and asks, “What’s your relationship with Shi Que?”

Character developments and interactions

• Banban shifts from uncertain and self-deprecating to acting with urgent purpose. Although overwhelmed by the conflicting realities, he chooses to follow Shi Que’s last instructions rather than engage in the struggle for leadership.
• Servant tries to protect Banban and secure a political future for the Abnormal People, but Banban dismisses his warnings as part of a false reality.
• Mr. Shi Que, absent from the chapter, remains a guiding influence through his instructions, his car, and his trench coat.
• Banban’s first encounter with the mysterious, nearly dead monster is tense and direct; their connection to Shi Que remains unknown.

Significant themes

• Reality and perception: Banban cannot tell which Xinhu is real, and each world seems to regard him as monstrous.
• Identity and isolation: His apparent status as the city’s only living person leaves him alienated from those he once considered friends and neighbors.
• Order versus human feeling: The managed district offers survival without suffering, but also without joy, hope, or ambition.
• Duty and compassion: Despite his fear and confusion, Banban follows Shi Que’s request to give the injured stranger more time.

Key plot points

• Banban finds a grotesquely wounded monster entwined with three corpses. He recognizes it as the “Strange Tale” serial killer used to justify the Three Major Organizations’ purges of the Old District, but suspects the story may have been fabricated.
• Ordinary healing medicine fails. Following his adoptive father Shi Que’s instructions, Banban gives the monster Dreamwake tablets. The monster awakens, and their shared memories of Xinhu’s two worlds finally align.
• Banban explains that eight seemingly unkillable beings are returning to Xinhu and replacing reality. Many people close to him have died, including his teachers Doctor Gao and Xia Yang, and Shi Que and Doctor Wuji. Banban believes he is the city’s last living anchor.
• Each tablet restores the monster’s lucidity while Banban sees him expand into the Old District itself: his body incorporates buildings and people, becoming a vast ship amid an ocean of Delirium.
• The eight Unknowables attack the ship. The monster refuses to wake fully from the dream, prolonging the struggle. Eventually the ship breaks apart, the inner flame goes out, and Banban sinks with it. His final remembered span is four years and one month.

Character developments and interactions

• Banban moves from fear and suspicion to choosing to save the monster. Though powerful and responsible for the Abnormal People, he confesses his grief and helplessness. His bond with Shi Que—and trust in his father over the organizations—guides his actions.
• The monster awakens through Dreamwake and appears to regain reason, but remains unwilling to end the dream. He reads Banban’s heart, while Banban glimpses the monster’s inner flame and witnesses his transformation.
• Their exchange is intimate but tragic: Banban brings the medicine and shares what has happened; the monster accepts it while continuing to resist the dream’s end.

Significant themes

• Reality and delusion: Xinhu is revealed as a world submerged in collective madness, where reality is distant and unstable.
• Sacrifice and endurance: Banban and the monster keep fighting despite near-certain failure, buying time at immense cost.
• Memory, grief, and inheritance: Banban carries the losses of his teachers and adoptive father, becoming Shi Que’s final contingency.
• Distrust of power and public narratives: Banban questions whether the organizations’ “righteous” explanations conceal their own motives.

Concise Chapter Summary

Key plot points and events

• After taking the white pill, Banban awakens from Delirium World. Memories of Shen Luo and Banban merge, and he recognizes that the ruined city around him is Xinhu.
• Four years and one month have passed in the real world. Xinhu is devastated, its streets buried in corpses, and the survivors’ struggle has badly weakened the rules of several Blood Cities.
• The Blood City Lords and other powerful beings awaken. The Lord of Blood Color announces that Hanhai Blood City must be destroyed next, while Butterfly moves toward the helpless figure at the center of Delirium World.
• Though terrified and gravely wounded, Banban stands between Butterfly and the figure, determined to buy even a few more seconds. He doubts whether his former game-panel talent still works, but refuses to give up or let others down.
• A group of rescuers arrives through a Blood Gate. Chang Wenyu attacks the weakened Lord of Aging Blood City, while Zhang Wenyu, Xiao Bu, and others follow. Their arrival checks the advancing threat.
• Painter recognizes the cost of Hanhai’s resistance and points out that it has held off the enemy for four years and one month. The person leading the group ignores the damaged city and focuses on Gao Ming, ordering Xu Yin to bring him out.

Character developments

• Banban wakes with one eye lost and half his body cursed. Despite terror and physical collapse, he chooses to protect someone else, showing how much courage and resolve he has gained.
• The Blood City Lords and Unknowables emerge weakened by the ordeal; some rules have nearly vanished, while others have been severely diminished. The Lord of Blood Color, however, appears stronger than before.
• Chang Wenyu and Zhang Wenyu arrive as formidable reinforcements, demonstrating the scale of the allies’ power and sacrifice.
• Gao Ming is revealed to be near death, stripped of skin and blood and covered in wounds, underscoring the devastating price of the conflict.

Significant themes

• Sacrifice and endurance: Hanhai’s resistance has bought time at an enormous cost.
• Courage amid terror: Banban acts even while afraid and badly injured.
• The cost of power and survival: Repeated crossings and rebirths have weakened the rules and left bodies and cities ruined.
• Hope through solidarity: Just as Banban seems alone, allies arrive to oppose the overwhelming threat.

Character interactions

• Banban confronts Butterfly, physically placing himself between Butterfly and the figure at the center of Delirium World.
• The awakened powers agree that Hanhai Blood City must be destroyed, while the Lord of Blood Color declares his intention to do so.
• Chang Wenyu targets the Lord of Aging Blood City; Zhang Wenyu and the other rescuers enter the devastated city behind him.
• Painter acknowledges Hanhai’s achievement and draws attention to the wounded Aging and Rotting forces.
• The group’s leader orders Xu Yin to retrieve Gao Ming.