Chapter Five: The List in Server Room Zero

The Silent Layer was not punishing Shen Yan for saving people. It was recalculating death. Every person rescued from the city of memory accelerated Lin Wan's countdown. Shen Yan covered his wall with the timelines of all three rescues and discovered that the missing time did not correspond to the number of lives saved. It corresponded to their weight in the city's data. The more accounts, photographs, and location records a person had, the larger the hole they left behind. “So the four unregistered workers cost her only twelve hours,” Su He said, then fell silent at her own words. Even an algorithm assigned different weights to human lives.