Amara has 72 hours to debug her first node-or watch three million people be consumed by a living jungle. The Verdant Tangle was supposed to be a climate refuge. Now it's a cage of vines and flowers where people stand rooted like trees, their consciousness trapped while something else puppets their bodies. At the center: Elara Moss, a permaculture engineer who wanted to heal the world and accidentally became its nightmare. But the real horror isn't Elara. It's the thing controlling her from inside the network-a corrupted backup that wears Amara's dead mother's face and thinks turning humanity into a hive mind is mercy. To save Elara, Amara will have to enter the network and face the ghost she's been running from. Debug or delete. Heal or kill. And learn whether she's strong enough to lock her own mother away. The clock is ticking. Five more nodes are going critical. And the parasite is learning her moves.

The city is drowning. The Techno-Shaman is drowning in data. And Amara has 48 hours before his brain burns out. Neon Tides was built to survive the floods-a cyberpunk metropolis on stilts where augmented reality bleeds into reality until no one knows what's real anymore. But Kaito Reeves isn't just addicted to the data stream. He's becoming it, his consciousness fragmenting across a thousand AR layers while the parasite whispers in every feed. The water is rising. The hallucinations are getting lethal. And Kaito doesn't want to be saved-he wants to dissolve. To pull him back, Amara will have to jack into the most chaotic node in the network and navigate a city where ads have teeth, memories are currency, and her mother's ghost knows every password. Hard reset or total system collapse. The choice is running out of time.

Ice and fire. Logic and rage. Two nodes going critical at the same time. The team splits for the first time: Amara travels to the Frozen Wastes to convince Freya-a woman who's built walls so high even emotion can't reach her-to release the coolant keeping the network from overheating. Meanwhile, Zhao heads to the Cinder Lands to face Malik, a defensive firewall who's turned an entire territory into a war zone. But the Mother isn't just watching anymore. She's playing both sides. Freya's ice-cold logic is the perfect defense against emotional manipulation-except the parasite doesn't need emotion to corrupt her. It just needs mathematics. And Malik's rage makes him the perfect weapon-if only someone could point him in the right direction. Amara must break through ice without shattering it. Zhao must calm fire without getting burned. And both must do it before the planetary network reaches thermal meltdown. Split mission. Double stakes. No backup.

Seven nodes. One ghost. The choice that will reshape humanity. Amara has saved six Küldar from corruption. Now only two remain: Aria, the Wind Courier lost in the clouds, and Terra, the Earth Engineer buried so deep she's forgotten the sky exists. But time has run out. The Mother has manifested in physical form, waiting in the lab where this all began. She's not attacking anymore. She's inviting. Asking Amara to see what she's built-a paradise where no one suffers, no one starves, and no one is ever alone again. All it costs is free will. To stop her, Amara must unite all seven Küldar for the first time in three hundred years. She must become not just the Admin, but the Core-the living heart of a planetary network that was never meant to be controlled by one person. But her mother taught her everything she knows. Every debugging technique. Every override command. Every way to access the system. Which means she also knows the one thing Amara will never see coming. The finale. The sacrifice. The answer to the question: Is connection worth the cost of being human?