Chapter One: Deliver Noodles to a Dead Man at Midnight

The left one had a seventy-three percent chance of drawing first. The right one had a sixty-one percent chance of stepping into electrified water. Lin saw twelve ways he would die in the next three seconds. No escape. Then a thirteenth path flickered over Zhou's soup: 0.03%. Lin threw the bowl onto the tracks. Broth connected a bare cable. Sparks erupted. One pursuer recoiled into another; the train braked in a storm of white fire. Lin dragged Zhou into the maintenance trench as the station went black. “Binding confirmed,” someone ordered above. “Capture alive. Remove both hands if necessary.” Zhou opened a mechanical pocket watch. Inside was microfilm: a young Grandma before a wall of mainframes, beside Guanlan's current chairman, Gu Beichen.