During a business trip to C City, Yang Wei, a songwriter from Corporation B, drinks a bottle of mineral water in his hotel, gets a strong stomach pain and falls asleep for three days.
For his examination, Yang Wei is brought into the dirty basement filled with moss and gets told, that the hospital demands a proof of his faith in form of money.
Yang Wei encounters multiple patients who themselves came back extremely angry, including one who paid a million dollars and one who had to pay for additional surgeries, that were neither necessary nor wished by him.
Yang Wei realizes that people starting to pay for treatment can't leave before it is concluded as they would otherwise waste the money already paid.
Sister Jiang tells him, that another person drank the mineral water at the hotel, but before she can leave, an angry former patient returns to detonate a bomb in the hospital, killing her.
[3] Ian Mond, writing in the Locus magazine, that „when viewed from a pre-COVID perspective, the novel’s central concerns seem to become about imperialism and authoritarianism“.
On the other hand „the novel’s final third is a remarkable display of the absurd and the cosmic, with what feels like a new, startling idea on every page.“[3] Another reception by Subashini Navaratnam was published in Strange Horizons on 29 January 2024.