Welcome to the System—the new home for humanity, which destroyed the Earth. Here people’s lives have become shorter, death takes on new forms, and the concept of God has been discarded in favor of a new religion: “AfterLife Ni,” a social network that promises subscribers resurrection—if other users vote for them. In this future on the barren planet Gehenna, two boys meet: a brilliant mathematician and the son of a crime boss. They don’t yet know that their friendship will change humankind forever. On the storm-battered, wind-swept planet of Hlad(e), a writer investigating a series of murders runs into a conspiracy of incredible scale. A simple repairman who survived an attack by a maniac becomes obsessed with death—and therefore an ideal candidate for dangerous work on an oil-drilling platform extracting a valuable resource from the planet’s depths. All these stories, and the fates of thousands of people, intertwine, and they all depend on what will happen in this complex lost in an eternally stormy sea—full of sarcophagi with the dead waiting for their second chance.