Zheng Lin awoke to freezing agony.


    Shattered-glass cold stabbed her nape as she surfaced from velvet-black unconsciousness. Her retinas burned with the afterimage of -40°C frostbite. A metallic hum vibrated in her ears. When her eyes finally focused, her teeth nearly pierced her tongue—her entire body hung suspended over an abyss.


    Three hundred meters of translucent ice sprawled beneath her, refracting emerald and aurora-purple light. Twenty-six frost-dusted bodies lay arranged across the glacial plane like glass paperweights scattered by a careless child. Thirty centimeters to her right, semi-transparent material melted away, revealing inverted stalactite ice spikes below. Their needle tips hovered half a meter from her drifting feet.


    The sound of shattering glass erupted behind her skull. As Zheng arched backward, she saw azure particles detonate across the dome ceiling, burning bloody words into the crystalline walls: Chapter 1: Magnetic Ice Fishing.


    "Holoprojection," rasped a male voice to her left. A bearded man in mountaineering gear scraped the ice with his thumb. "Specifically, nano-LED screens sandwiched between dual-sealed ice layers." He examined an ice shard in his palm. "I’ve surveyed sixty glaciers over thirty years, but this composite structure…" His voice died.


    Zheng followed his gaze. The inverted ice spikes began rotating uniformly, as if some cosmic hand had wound a colossal music box. As ice dust rained into the void, all the human "paperweights" convulsed in unison.


    "Defibrillator-level currents," said a silver-haired woman kneeling behind them, her pale fingers pressed to a corpse’s neck. "Fifty joules discharged every forty-five seconds." When the third pulse hit, the nearest girl jolted awake, her scream severed mid-shriek.


    The ice sheet turned suddenly transparent. In the scream’s aftermath, all saw the abyss’ true form—tens of thousands of metal barbs writhed beneath, spiraling DNA-like toward the Earth’s core, their tips sparking blue arcs. The "ice" suspending them was actually a melting monocrystalline disk.


    A woman in striped hospital garb lunged forward. Her blood traced a parabolic arc as she struck the ice. Cracks spread like living things. Before Zheng could track the fractures, the woman’s body fragmented into geometric shards, plummeting with ice-sharp screams.


    Stolen story; please report.


    "Fifteen seconds to melt seven millimeters," muttered a bespectacled man in a suit, his glasses glazed with blue light. "We’re lying on 0°C ice, but there are seventeen thermal anomalies." He revealed a subdermal temperature chip. "That meltpoint measured exactly 37°C, error margin…"


    The ice trembled. Twelve tungsten-steel fishing rods erupted through the surface, atmospheric pressure spiking. Zheng tasted ionized ozone as electromagnetic shackles dented her collarbone. When the rods fully materialized, collective blood turned to slush.


    These were no ordinary rods.


    Thumb-thick shafts sheathed in bio-neural fibers terminated not in hooks, but spinning chainsaw blades. Zheng watched a construction worker to her right try severing his line—his left arm disintegrated upon touching the laser filament, edges glowing with vaporized metal ions.


    "Magnetic confinement plasma blades," the bearded man chuckled, his Adam’s apple trembling. "The bastard wants Russian roulette?" His rod abruptly curved parabolic, spool vibrating.


    Zheng’s temple throbbed. At the ninth second, she deciphered the vibrations—all rods’ magnetic poles were alternating. With each polarity shift, bestial roars ascended from the abyss. Bodies jerked like compass needles under a child’s whim.


    A tracksuited girl reacted first. She tore her thermal shirt with teeth, wrapped burnt palms, and began sprinting circles around her rod. Blue trails spiraled behind her, ice fracturing into crystalline blossoms.


    "Centrifugal force triggers the lock!" Zheng realized—this thought wasn’t her own. Currents from her left chest implant activated neural synapses. Studying her shackle, her retina projected a 32-digit code fluctuating with the ice’s opacity.


    The girl whimpered triumphantly. At her magnetic vortex’s heart, silver-gray liquid metal seeped through ice. Joy froze mid-breath—her left calf twisted backward, bone-crack lost to magnetic static. Zheng saw nanobots swarm up the line toward the girl’s spine.


    "Don’t touch phase-shift metal!" The suited man’s warning came late. The girl’s body flared magnesium-bright, skin honeycombed with fleeing light-sparks. When darkness returned, her remains hung paper-thin, crumbling to ash in the magnetic field.


    Ancient gears ground through the ice chamber. Sixteen frozen stairs rose from the abyss, each levitating fragmented metal components. Zheng’s rod shuddered violently, line-barbs gashing her palm. Blood-scent blooming, she recognized the shapes—metallic replicas of human finger bones.


    "Using corpses as parts…" The silver-haired woman coughed blood, her rod wrenching her arm toward a 135° magnetic angle. "This equation solves with death."


    The stairs collapsed as she spoke. A lab-coated man lunged, shoving a nurse into the magnetic storm. The victim’s scream triggered infrasonic resonance, webbing the ice with cracks. As they fell, Zheng finally noticed the red dot atop the ice walls—a wide-angle camera hidden in aurora refraction, its live-stream signal blinking hungrily.