In an apocalypse where gears grind together like rusted teeth, seventeen-year-old Lu Zhao, a pickpocket from the slums, carries a pocket watch that can reverse time and bears a blood debt for his sister Lu Xue, devoured by the Erosion Swarm. He steps into a Cthulhu abyss where machinery and flesh fuse together.
When a mechanical raven from Night Watch’s Seventh Squad drags him into the Tower of Eternal Day, when a clone of Lu Xue opens her molten-gold eyes inside a growth pod, and when the pocket watch left behind by his father begins to reverse cause and effect, Lu Zhao discovers that he himself is the “original sin vessel” through which the Erosion Core descended. Bai Ling, a girl with blue markings coiling around her neck; Rock, a giant with Roman tattoos embedded in his spine; Bai Feng, the Funeral Parlor’s leader, whose face is half-rotted... Every faction is fighting for the key to time inside him. And the truth is cruel, layer after layer, like peeling an onion: human civilization is nothing more than a breeding ground selected by the Erosion Core, and every rewind of time feeds the deep-space Erosion Mother Nest.
In this cybernetic hell, where bronze reliefs seal away the Erosion Core, Lu Zhao must use a five-second time prison to tear open humanity’s bloody lie of evolution, caught between the memory of his sister’s warmth and the cold data of his mechanical eye. When the Night Watch bell tower tolls, when the Funeral Parlor’s Erosion Moon swells, and when billions of the Erosion’s offspring descend from Orion, the cost of reversing time will finally teach every survivor that:
Hope is nothing more than daring to make the wrong choice in a rusting world.
AI creation traces are too heavy...