The Nine Provinces hang upside down, and cultivators who ascend plunge straight into the abyss. Mo Xiao, a boy from a fishing village, awakens an ancient forbidden spirit vein, only to draw twin assassins who massacre his entire village. A bronze ring pulls him into a conspiracy three hundred years in the making. Each time he devours someone else's time, his memories are altered, while the histories of the Nine Provinces quietly record him as a fiend bent on destroying the world.
To break the time-erosion curse and return to the scene of the tragedy, Mo Xiao discovers that his village was wiped out a century ago. Deep within the Sword Mound, the roots of a floating bronze tree grow upward. A woman in white, carrying an Ice Lotus Sword, always appears when his life hangs by a thread, yet the silver bell on her wrist resonates with his bloodline. When he gathers the fragments of the Tianyan Sundial, a horrifying truth emerges: the Nine Provinces are a prison for those guilty of crimes against time, and all cultivators are pieces in a cycle controlled by observers.
Mo Xiao is forced to face the cruelest choice: kill his past self from three hundred years ago and end the chain of cause and effect, or let the spirit-vein parasite devour the present world. At the end of the upside-down abyss, seven ice coffins hold the versions of himself who failed in past cycles. The newest one is slowly taking on the face of the woman in white...
Amid this calamity that turns time and space inside out, the only thing real is the tear stain on the bronze ring, which never fades.
