This entire manhua is a major bait-and-switch. The synopsis is completely misleading. I thought this was going to be a heartwarming fantasy story but it turns out to be some sci-fi detective story full of betrayals and secret conspiracies and evil organizations.

The boy in the synopsis was the only character I actually cared about and it turns out he's not the main character, nor the girl who saved him. He and the girl who saves him play basically no role at all in the story and completely disappear after the first few chapters.

The actual main character is the intermediary. But I've now finished reading the entire manhua and I still don't feel any connection to him at all. If he died, it would have zero emotional impact on me. The story gives us no reason to care about him. There is no emotional buildup, no development of character relationships, none of that. The story is entirely plot driven and there is no character development whatsoever. It's all about secret conspiracies and trying to crack passwords and betraying people, there are no actual genuine relationship building moments. The only time a character is portrayed as sympathetic, that character is killed off for some cheap drama. That basically killed my investment in the story.

The actual plot of the story itself is very cliched and reminds me of Darker Than Black. . I can't believe I wasted all that time reading so many chapters just to get to such a cliched "secret". That's literally all there is. And the ending is so stupid too. It felt like an asspull. Urgh why did I waste my time reading this.

The rules of the story are also completely fucked:

Lots of unnecessary misunderstandings and drama are caused by characters being deliberately obtuse or secretive about things they have no reason to be secretive about. Actually, most of the plot wouldn't have happened if people just told their loved ones what they were doing.

Many factual errors showed that the author clearly didn't do their research properly. One of the most egregious examples happened in chapter 14 when the cop said "I have determined that the password is 10 bytes which means 5 chinese characters". Bullshit. That's not how encryption works. There is absolutely no way, with any sensible modern encryption system (e.g. argon2 + AES-GCM), that an attacker can discover ANYTHING about the password, without outright just discovering the password. For example, a timing side channel attack would allow the attacker to recover the entire password one character at a time - except that's fully automatic, no human guesswork needed, and it would definitely not work on a chip which only allows 3 password attempts before self-destructing. This whole idea that you can discover that the password is made of 5 characters by just studying the chip is just stupid and unrealistic. You'd have to have some ridiculously advanced hardware reverse engineering capabilities, which would definitely not be accessible to some ordinary policeman. The fact that just makes it even more laughable. Furthermore, even if you determined that the password was 10 bytes long, that doesn't mean it's 5 Chinese characters. It could just be 10 ASCII characters. And what about variable-length encodings? Urgh. So stupid.

Not rating this because I don't really know how to rate a story like this but it's certainly not a masterpiece. I would not rate it higher than a 7/10.

... Last updated on May 18th, 2021, 6:05am