It started when a bloody rain was about to fall.

That day, the sky seemed to be torn open from within, and what flowed from the gap was not rain, but a sticky, sweet-smelling curse. As the blood rain fell, the world began to scream. No one knew why—genes randomly recombined within those blood-red droplets, like dice thrown by fate, their fate sealed the moment they landed. Some awoke with flames twining around their fingertips; some caused space to collapse in an instant, kneeling on the ruins as gods; others never rose again, their skin crawling with mutated lines, the last vestige of humanity extinguished in their pupils, reduced to shadows wandering the scorched earth. After that rain, the world was never normal again, all pretense torn away overnight. Order was like chewed-up paper, morality like a burned flag. Mutations roamed the ruins, monsters lurked, the bones of the weak crushed under the feet of the strong. The law of the jungle seeped into every inch of land, like a poisonous vine, impossible to eradicate completely. Lin Ye was once an ant at the very bottom of this law. In his past life, it was like this—before the apocalypse, he traversed the city's walls, pouring his sweat into the soil, only to earn the right to continue bowing his head the next day; after the apocalypse, he huddled in the shadows, swallowing scraps, barely surviving, like a grain of sand crushed into the mud. But he was reborn. The moment he opened his eyes, nothing had yet begun. The blood rain had not yet fallen, the world was still turning as usual—only he knew that something had been slowly writhing in the shadows, the plan laid long ago. In this life, he was finally no longer just dust on the chessboard.