My City Has Thousands of Copies

Late at night in the Zhonghai office building, Su Yi, who had worked overtime until he was drowsy and slumped over his desk, was suddenly awakened by a scorching heat.

Groggily raising himself, he found the source of the heat was the bracelet he wore on his right wrist. He still remembered how he had acquired it: back in college, he had bought it from an elderly street vendor beneath an overpass. The old man claimed it was an heirloom, though he couldn’t say what it was made of or its value, only that Su Yi could have it for a reasonable price. Seeing the man, well past his eighties, still hustling for a living, Su Yi’s compassion was stirred, and he purchased it for one hundred yuan.

He had worn the bracelet for years without incident, but now it was emitting an increasingly bright red glow. A sharp pain shot through his forehead—the small wound he had gotten that evening, when he bravely intervened against a thug outside the company, had reopened.

The dark brown bloodstain on the bracelet made Su Yi uneasy, and he suddenly realized that the mutation was likely caused by the blood flowing from his forehead wound. The lights around him began to flicker erratically. Unable to remove the bracelet, Su Yi dashed to his colleague Xiao Mei’s desk across from him and pulled a black stun baton from beneath it.

Xiao Mei, fashionable and attractive, had developed a paranoid fear after reading too many news reports about ride-sharing incidents. She had spent a hefty sum to buy this upgraded stun baton online for her late-night journeys home.

The surro