When Lin Sanxiao received the bloodstained bronze compass, the gears of fate ground time and space to pieces.
As the young owner of a rundown antique shop in Jinling, he had never imagined that his family's inherited "Dragon-Shaking Scripture" was an experimental log spanning five centuries. The astrological mechanisms of the Jiajing era had become tangled in an inextricable knot with the gene-editing project at Modern-Day Institute 507.
Deep within Nanjing's Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, a corpse wearing a gas mask crawls out of the underground palace, dragging bronze chains behind it;
Beneath the Qinling Mountains' dragon veins, nanomechanical insects course through the veins of living terracotta warriors;
At the altar beneath Xuanwu Lake, twelve bronze coffins embedded with LCD screens play memories of their own past lives.
To unravel the mystery, Lin Sanxiao joins forces with his streetwise friend Wang Tiezhu and the enigmatic researcher Su Jiu'er. The trio flee through the cracks between multiple timelines:
- **1987 laboratory**: Babies dressed in Ming-era swaddling clothes float in embryo-cultivation tanks
- **2003 archive room**: His grandfather's final letter foretells the course of his life
- **Jiajing Year 37 underground palace**: The blood and flesh boiling in the alchemy furnace belong to clones
When the final veil is torn away...
The bronze crow on Su Jiu'er's collarbone spreads its wings and flies free, the genetic chain in Wang Tiezhu's body flashes with the code of the Twenty-Eight Mansions, and the scales on Lin Sanxiao's chest begin transforming the entire city of Jinling into a colossal armillary sphere.
This is a battle in which time itself becomes a weapon.
Either use bronze genes to corrode the cycle of reincarnation, or become an eternal test subject amid the collapse of time and space.
