I'm Just a Scrap Collector, and You Want Me to Fight the Eldritch Old Gods?

In the twenty-eighth year of the Tianqi era, humanity opened the Gate of the Spirit Pivot, unaware of the primordial gaze lurking beyond it. The Five Great Conglomerates loomed high like gods, bestowing supernatural abilities in the name of grace: entropy fire that burned away life, ice coffins that froze time, fangs that tore through dimensions... Martial artists pursued power, while patterns of mutation quietly spread across their flesh. Fang Xing Tong, the sole inheritor of supernatural powers over time and space, was the variable in this world, and the key to breaking through the Gate. At sixteen, he witnessed the strange runes of a compass. Through the cracks in his memory seeped the chill of an ice coffin and the sound of divination tortoiseshells shattering. From beneath the Demon City came the roar of an ancient tide. The suppressants on Zhongnan Mountain could delay mutation, but they could not heal the sorrow in the eyes of the leader of the Revenants. They said only this: mastering the power of space and time was the only way to break the deadlock. He learned to measure the world's laws with his pupils: In an instant of slowed time, bullets congealed in midair like teardrops. Touch a bloodstain, and screams from seven days ago pierced his eardrums. Each time he glimpsed the truth, a piece of his skin peeled away, revealing an inhuman glow beneath. Some called him an apostle of the Outer Gods. Others knelt and begged him to sever the invisible chains around the martial artists' necks. At the other end of those chains lay the indescribable shackles of the deep sea and the farthest reaches of the stars.