**When time becomes a parasite, will you be the tombstone of civilization or the pathogen of a new world?**
The last bus in Qingmu Town vanishes without fail at 1:15 a.m. Intern doctor Lin Xia enters this eerie little town, abandoned by time, to investigate her aunt’s mysterious disappearance, only to discover that she has been part of the game all along. Golden gear patterns appear on her wrists, her memories conceal the deadly truth behind the Clock of Time, and every midnight, “she” from seven parallel worlds arrives like a quantum ghost to fight for her body.
**A mind-bending work of dark science fiction:**
- **Gears of Flesh**: Bronze timers grow inside the townspeople’s chests, and the church crypt is piled high with specimens of mechanical organs
- **Quantum Plague**: People infected by time anchors collapse between three and two dimensions
- **Host War**: A many-sided hunt involving the National Security Bureau’s cloning labs, a religious Gear Cult, and an alien civilization that harvests resources
- **Memory Torture**: Every erased timeline becomes a neural probe driven into the spine
Amid a space-time catastrophe spanning twenty-three years, Lin Xia gradually uncovers the cruelest truth: the so-called Clock of Time is merely an entropy-reduction device deployed by a higher civilization. Qingmu Town is a universe-scale recycling station, and she, the Host implanted with its core data, is both its savior and the virus that must be eradicated.
**When salvation becomes a sin:**
- Stopping time requires sacrificing the seven versions of yourself from parallel worlds
- Curing Alzheimer’s disease will trigger a global quantum
