Husk Files

The protagonist has no powers whatsoever. What Li Kaichen has is the toolkit a crime beat beats into you: how to run an interview, how to cross-check a timeline, how to spot the exact sentence where someone starts lying, how to photocopy a file before it gets shredded and put the copy somewhere else. When the world starts editing itself, his only weapon is the record — and keeping records, in a world that rewrites memory, is the most dangerous job available.

It starts with a piece of footage. At 3:17 a.m. the sky over Xinyi splits for a few seconds. Dozens of people see it; by the next morning not one of them can recall it. Only the file on his phone still exists, and every so often it loses a few more frames. Pulling on that thread exposes an entire line that has been systematically smoothed over: people reported missing whom nobody remembers, "husk-bodies" who come back with something subtly wrong, and a rift black market quietly taking shape beneath the city.

The setting holds deliberately to a ground-level, ordinary-person view. No organization issues the protagonist equipment. No mentor appears at the critical moment to explain the rules. What he has is colleagues, informants, an old contact at the precinct who owes him one, and a camera that could be confiscated at any time. Danger is not a monster lunging out of the dark. It is finding, halfway through a case, that someone has been through your interview notes — or that the source who agreed to talk yesterday has no memory today of anything they said.

Structurally, the early arcs stay with urban anomalies and rift documentation, one case per episode, clues interlocking. The middle moves into lockdown zones, black-market dealing, and a global wave of rifts, scaling from a single city to a cross-border problem. The later arcs reveal the deeper truth and force the protagonist to decide whether to publish what he holds or keep sitting on it. The tension throughout comes from a very practical question: when the evidence itself keeps vanishing, how do you prove you are not insane?

The core proposition is not monsters invading; it is who can still hold reality together when the world starts deleting it. The work breaks that question down into concrete choices for its characters — whether to file the story, whether to protect a source, whether to trust someone whose remembered version differs from yours. Nobody here is unambiguously right. There are only different people willing to absorb different costs.

You can simply read the main episodes in order. The site also carries a universe codex (worldview, rift records, factions, glossary), character files, and observation reports, unlocking progressively with your reading position so nothing gets spoiled early. The work is published in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean. All characters, institutions, events, and depictions of places herein are works of fiction, and bear no relation to any real person, group, or event.