The Mortal Cage: A Passage Through the Ruins of Delusion - The Hollow Cage, Volume I

Some cages are made of iron. This one is built from erased memories, borrowed lives, and a system that calls obedience protection.

In a rain-soaked city, a frightened patient hears the walls breathing. Dr. Qing Heng detects the same impossible seven-hertz pulse and preserves the evidence instead of sending it into a process designed to make anomalies disappear.

Investigator Gui Tang follows that signal into a fracture beneath ordinary reality. What begins as a clinical mystery opens onto a vast system of memory control, death, recovery, and institutional power. The deeper they go, the harder the question becomes: if humanity survives only by surrendering the continuity of the self, what exactly has been saved?

The Mortal Cage: A Passage Through the Ruins of Delusion is Volume I of The Hollow Cage, a philosophical cultivation fantasy about mortality, illusion, resistance, and the stubborn human need to remain human.

Included

• Complete Volume I, Chapters 1-288
• Approximately 603,000 English words
• EPUB for reflowable ebook reading
• PDF for fixed-layout reading
• Personalized LemonInk watermarking for each buyer

English-edition disclosure: This edition was produced through AI translation and AI-based editorial reworking of a Chinese-language original. It has not received verified review by a bilingual human editor knowledgeable in both Chinese and English. Translation errors, tonal shifts, awkward phrasing, or loss of cultural nuance may remain.

Content note: Death, memory erasure, coercion, institutional violence, psychological distress, and references to self-harm.

License: Personal use only. The files may not be redistributed, resold, publicly uploaded, or shared with others.