When Sanxingdui archaeologist Lin Sui excavates a mysterious bronze sacred tree, she accidentally triggers a quantum genetic lock that has lain dormant for three thousand years. Bronze liquid seeps into her wound, and her mitochondrial DNA begins rewriting reality. Visions spanning from the Shang and Zhou dynasties to the 22nd century appear on her retinas: a strange man in military uniform, Cheng Ye, is casting his own mechanical heart inside a Northern Wei Buddhist shrine. Meanwhile, data left behind in her father Lin Jianye's laboratory points to a shocking truth about her mother's fatal fall from a building.
As the roots of the bronze sacred tree pierce the dimensions of time and space, Lin Sui and Cheng Ye, a soldier from the future who has become quantum-based, are forced to join forces. They discover that the so-called "bronze artifacts" are actually biological quantum computers from an ancient civilization, that oracle bone script is genetic code, and that the taotie patterns conceal equations capable of controlling time. The two travel between the bronze bells of Luoyang's Yongning Temple Pagoda, anti-entropy code hidden in a secret chamber of the Mohists from the Warring States period, and a cocoon of time and space forged inside a 22nd-century particle collider. Little by little, they uncover a cruel truth: Lin Jianye's "Human Completion Project" turned civilization into a bronze spark, and her mother was its first living test subject.
As bronze genes begin devouring reality and the countdown ticks away, Lin Sui must make a choice on the edge of a rooftop, wielding an archaeological brush and a military knife to cut through two dimensions. Will humanity become quantum life, eternally encased in bronze, or will she sever a chain of cause and effect spanning three thousand years and rewrite every possibility before the blood-red dawn when her mother fell? The stakes in this battle are the bronze heart beating in Cheng Ye's titanium-alloy rib cage, the molten tin-isotope magma churning beneath Sanxingdui, and that tear, still untouched by bronze, reflecting the last trace of humanity in the web of time and space her father wove with the Mohist Canon and an armillary sphere.
