The Ash Protocol

In the coal-choked republic of Kaelvia, a staggering black-money laundering scandal conceals a primordial secret: the nation's financial titans operate an exclusive game reserve where the homeless are hunted for sport. When ex-special forces officer Darian Kade is snatched from the streets and dumped into the abandoned Toren Valley mine complex, he becomes the newest quarry. His struggle for survival unearths a chilling philosophical framework—the "Epochal Ethics" doctrine—which posits that morality is merely a luxury of stable civilizations, and that in times of collapse, the predator-prey dynamic is the only truth. A social-crime thriller in the vein of Liu Cixin, exploring how the definition of evil bends to the will of the powerful across different eras.