In a bizarre maze city cast in bronze, time is an endless torture.
Every twenty-four hours, the City of No Escape crashes down. The flesh of the dead and the ruins of its buildings are sucked into the Guixu, then restored to their original state when the bronze clepsydra releases its first drop of water at midnight. Thirty-six "sinners" are trapped here, forced to take part in a twelve-hour game of life and death devised by the Four Divine Beasts. At the hour of the Tiger, they must pilot a bronze south-pointing chariot whose magnetic poles have reversed across a rift valley. At the hour of the Dragon, they must evade the deadly shadows in a sundial maze cast by the White Tiger's pupils. At noon, they must mix the five elements of incense ash to keep a furnace on the verge of exploding in check... With every trial they pass, survivors' bodies are branded with the three marks of Heaven, Earth, and Man. The souls of those who fail are forever forged into the pedestals of the divine beasts' bronze statues.
Lu Yi, a former national Go champion, awakens in a pool of blood to discover that he can glimpse fragments of a shattered future. His companions are Su Jiuli, a physician who can make herbs grow from flesh and blood, and Xuanji, a tomb raider who understands the earth's ley lines but bears a curse. The three gradually realize that the fragments of the Gan and Shi Star Manual engraved on bronze vessels, and the I Ching hexagrams drifting in the ashes of incense coils, all point to a conspiracy a thousand years in the making. The Four Divine Beasts have long been corrupted by the Guixu, and the supposed escape route is nothing but a harvesting ground for beings from a higher dimension.
The ninth time Lu Yi touches the Azure Dragon's marrow jade amid a thunderstorm, he finally sees the truth beyond the blood-red sky: the waves of an electrocardiogram resonate with the dripping of the bronze clepsydra, and a bronze compass hangs high outside the hospital window. This city, which devours countless lost souls, is nothing more than a causality prison left behind by an ancient civilization. The true punishment is to make the awakened carry their memories through an eternal cycle, personally forging hope into despair.
