Rewind Syndrome

When memory becomes a prison, the cycle is a curse.

In the near future, Xinhai City has sunk into a rift in time. After a bizarre plane crash, some survivors develop “rewind syndrome,” forced to relive scenes of death again and again: a convenience store on a rainy night, a bloodstained subway station, a mirrored maze. Growing inside their skulls are priceless “memory amber” deposits, while shadowy figures roam the darkness, swinging their scythes to harvest these moments frozen in time.

Lin Zhou, a convenience store clerk with dual temporal personalities, is the most unusual prey in this hunt. A “Night Owl” from the future is parasitic inside her body. Whenever the digital clock reads 3:14, the two souls struggle for control amid the pain of spreading temporal erosion. A fragment of an airplane embedded in her left wrist keeps leaking the truth about her older brother’s plane crash, while the bloodstained wedding ring that mysteriously appears after each cycle, the heart beating backward, and wounds oozing clock gears all point to the “Night Owl Protocol,” buried by the Time Administration Bureau fifty years ago.