Prologue: The Way of Disappearing
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A NOTE ON THIS TRANSLATION
You are reading a working draft.
The original is in Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin editions). This English version was produced with AI assistance — the same class of tools the book itself examines.
I could have waited for a polished human translation. That would have been the safer choice. But this book is about what happens when we wait for safer choices. It felt dishonest to hold the book back while people who might need it continue to sit in the same rooms it describes.
So this draft goes out as it is. Imperfect. In motion. Being refined.
If you find passages that don't land, that's real feedback. I'd like to hear it.
— Nebula Walker April 2026 portaly.cc/Mythogen
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"If this book can save even one person—one person is worth it." —— Lin Zhao-ming
Location: Mirror Realm · Emerald Isle Study (Parallel Universe 15) Time: 25 FEB 1026, Present
Lin Zhao-ming returned to his study and didn't turn on the light.
Outside the window was the sea. The color of the water couldn't be seen in the night, only a few scattered lights in the distance. Looking in this direction, it was beautiful.
He didn't turn around. He knew what was behind him—at the foot of the mountain, the lights of the factory district, a completely different kind of brightness.
The sounds of the New Year gathering were still ringing in his ears, but he only remembered one sentence—someone pouring drinks, speaking in a tone as casual as discussing the weather: "Hey, did you know someone jumper again over in the power department? Right near the Aura Synthesis building."
Then the topic shifted. Someone called for a toast.
He tapped to illuminate his Mirror Screen terminal.
The light from the screen reflected on his face. He didn't move. In the Mirror Realm, he knew exactly how long this news of death would survive—seventy-two hours, or less. It wasn't deletion; it was dilution. First, discussions about "personal emotional management," then "workplace stress," and then, that person's name would disappear into a pile of corporate wellbeing push notifications, until it finally became like a closed ticket, utterly impossible to find.
He opened the search bar and typed in a few code words that only insiders could string together.
The thread appeared. People were still talking.
He glanced at the timestamp.
Almost time.
This wasn't his first time keeping track of such a countdown. It was always the same—you had to race against the algorithm, to save those words before the system could identify them. Not to do anything with them, but because if you couldn't even manage to witness it in time, that person would truly never have existed at all.
He started taking screenshots.
The study was quiet; his wife was already asleep. Sitting in the darkness, the screen light scrolled down line by line. Inside were terms he recognized—testing, pressure, yield rate, 24-hour standby—pieced together in unfamiliar ways, reading like they were talking about something else entirely, but he knew exactly what they meant.
He knew better than anyone the exact shape of what lurked behind those code words.
Four years. It took him four years to learn how to recognize that shape.
Save. Encrypt. Close.
He took his hands off the keyboard and sat in the darkness, unmoving.
The sound of a car passed by outside the window, very distant, and then vanished.
He thought of the person pouring drinks tonight. The next second, they were toasting. No one stopped. It wasn't malice, it was—he couldn't find another word for it—it was that the person's death had absolutely no impact on the operation of that table.
He opened an old folder. Inside was something he had started writing four years ago, only to abandon it after a few paragraphs.
He looked at those few lines of text.
Then he moved the cursor to the last line and began to type.
It wasn't out of righteous indignation, nor a sense of mission.
It was: If I don't leave something behind in these seventy-two hours, maybe there really will be nothing left at all.
Location: Mirror Realm · Emerald Isle Study (Parallel Universe 15) Time: 8 NOV 1024 (One year, three months, and seventeen days ago)
That thread he had once seen. He clicked on it. "This article has been deleted." He tried a few different keywords. Nothing. He used vaguer terms. He found one, posting date, November 1024. Someone in the post asked, "Where's the news?" There was no reply below. The post just sat there, and no one said anything else.
He remembered that PTT post. He had seen it with his own eyes. And he watched it vanish.
An R&D engineer at Mist Valley Tech, responsible for the Mirror Screen terminal's electronic core, specifically running the Aura Synthesis project. Committed suicide due to excessive pressure.
When he died, Lin Zhao-ming was still inside that company. The news spread in hushed tones; three hours later, no one mentioned it again. At noon on November 14, 1024, Team Building proceeded as usual. No one brought it up, no one thought about it. The existence of that person was erased from that very moment.
Lin Zhao-ming constantly checked PTT that night. A thread would appear, and he would watch it get deleted. Change boards, search again, deleted again. In less than a week, a total blackout.
That person, it was as if they had never existed at all.
But Lin Zhao-ming knew he had existed.
Because someone knew him. Because when that post existed, Lin Zhao-ming had read every single word. Because he recognized every detail in that post—endless testing, not knowing what mistake to admit to, three to five-hour meetings where the goal wasn't communication, but distortion.
The AI at the time was still in its "earnestly talking nonsense" phase. The AI confidently declared that if this were true, the system would definitely be able to find clues; yet it scoured the data and found nothing. So the AI began to emphasize: if this were true, it couldn't possibly leave no trace.
Just like that, a living human being, a vivid testament of blood and tears, ultimately ended up with even the AI questioning his reality.
That was a person.
Not data. Not an isolated case. Not collateral evidence of a systemic problem. It was a person, with a name, with colleagues who knew him, someone who had asked "Where's the news?" in that post, and never received an answer.
Lin Zhao-ming knew of two people closely.
From what he heard at dinner tables, there were many more.
He wasn't using those lives to tell a story. He just refused to believe that those people died for absolutely nothing. So many died, there couldn't be nothing left.
The media didn't report it, because of advertising revenue.
The mods deleted the posts, because of board rules.
The family didn't speak up, because they couldn't win the fight.
The colleagues didn't speak up, because the next one could be them.
The company didn't acknowledge it, because of legal.
The Ministry of Labor didn't open a case, because it "occurred outside of working hours."
There was no mastermind. Everyone had their own reasons. Added together, it equaled disappearance.
It wasn't that someone gave an order to make him disappear. It was that everyone with the power to make him exist, after running their own calculations, chose to let him disappear.
Lin Zhao-ming had looked up the numbers.
After finding that number, he closed his browser.
The number itself didn't surprise him. That was the most terrifying part—when he saw that number, his first thought wasn't "how is this possible," it was "that's less than what I've seen with my own eyes."
He was an almost impossible witness.
He had the technical knowledge to judge the causality between the deaths and the system. He had the insider perspective, having spent four years inside that structure. He had the time, because he had already been laid off. He had savings. He had the motive, because he knew that if he didn't write it, those people would truly never have existed.
Even if only one person reads this book, recognizes the place they are in, and chooses not to continue—
One person is worth it.
He opened a new document.
He wasn't out to prove anything. He didn't have backend logs, no written confirmation from anyone, no complete chain of evidence, and he couldn't publish any internal data.
He only had the fragments of four years, and the things he had seen with his own eyes.
The system told him: You are merely speculating.
Maybe.
But what he knew, was what he knew.
Four years ago, he predicted they might be this kind of people. He chose to assume they weren't. He just did the work.
He began to write.