Lin Wei survived Floor 1. He didn't expect to wake up corrupted on Floor 8. The Tower's network is at war. Glitched monsters phase in and out of reality, tearing through floors that no longer follow their own rules. Three rival climbing teams race toward the Network Core with agendas that have nothing to do with survival. And somewhere above Floor 25, something from outside the system is injecting corrupted code into Tower Zero itself — rewriting the dungeon from the inside out. Lin Wei has one advantage: he can see the data streams. Read the code bleeding through the walls. And what he sees is worse than any boss he's faced — a parasitic system from a parallel tower, consuming Tower Zero's core one packet at a time. Stopping it means binding himself to the Tower permanently. Trading his freedom for the role of System Guardian. Becoming part of the machine he's been fighting to survive. But Lin Wei's never been good at following the script. And when the SysAdmins turn hunter, when the factions start making moves, when the people depending on him start dying — he'll have to decide what he's actually willing to become. The Network Wars have begun. The corruption is only the opening move. And the real enemy hasn't even arrived yet.