While restoring a bronze artifact from the Yin Ruins, Jiang Yanqiu, a graduate student in archaeology, triggers a temporal reversal in a quantum clock. Oracle-bone script in the laboratory comes alive on the walls as movable type, a bronze sacred tree sprouts inside the abdominal cavity of a thousand-year-old corpse, and a map of the celestial stars emerges across his shattered spine. It is the Heavenly Pivot Lock, sealed by an ancient dynasty, imprisoning a Zhulong capable of devouring the orbits of the stars.
When an inverted celestial palace descends upon the modern city, neon lights and stars shine together on the asphalt. Jiang Yanqiu is forced to confront his dual identity: a modern scholar deciphering bronze inscriptions, and the prince of the Mirage Tower who personally severed the Milky Way ten thousand years ago. Each time he uses the Returning-Heaven Ruler to measure a rift in space and time, his memories slip away like grains of sand. Meanwhile, those he has forgotten are using the spirits of prophecy to rewrite the folds of history.
On the night the Bronze Age begins anew, the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions fall like a cage. Jiang Yanqiu grips the River Chart and Luo Writing, its patterns searing his palm, and glimpses the cruelest truth as quantum computers resonate with astrolabes: the so-called Nine Luminaries Star Chart is nothing but a wager in the gods' game, and the dragon's roar in his spine is the only sword-song capable of cleaving fate apart.
I'm so confused, I feel like I'm reading a diary