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.
It's just about this evil guy who wants to extract life energy from the dumb people to give to smart people to make them live longer
. 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.
! Main problem is that the "good guy" who saved the day was not introduced AT ALL before the ending of the story. So you're telling me there was a good guy in the organization all along? And he was just completely fine with all the evil things that the director did before, including forcing people to commit suicide? But now he's suddenly become a good guy when the main director wants to kill off some employees?
Urgh why did I waste my time reading this.
The rules of the story are also completely fucked:
Apparently someone has to be willing to commit suicide in order for you to be able to absorb their life particles. But then this guy is able to absorb the life particles of his dog? How is a dog able to consent to committing suicide? Makes no sense.
Also let's not forget that the dog guy literally murdered another girl - he literally transplanted his daughter's mind into that girl's body so that his daughter can live. And he gets away with it too, scot free. What a fucked up ending.
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.
You're telling me that every single person who signs a contract with a secret shady organization just keeps their mouth shut and never tells their most trusted loved ones about it? Simply unbelievable. I would have believed it if the organization had some kind of magical mind-control device to stop them from telling, but there was no such thing. They all just decided to keep it a secret from their loved ones in order for the plot and drama to happen.
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
even the villains, who had access to ridiculous amounts of resources, could not decrypt the chip
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.
(-17)
