As the world is consumed by a temporal affliction, at 3:33 a.m. humanity moves like puppets on strings, repeating the motions of their own deaths. Lu Canxing, a forensic examiner at a funeral home, discovers that a body frozen for thirty years is clutching a Douyin phone. This awakens his ability to "usurp fate at the hour of the ox." To save his younger sister, who has only 33 days of life remaining, he is forced to join forces with Su Qiqiao, a time streamer who manipulates memory futures.
Her million followers' memories are the bargaining chip; his ability to rewrite death is the wager. Meanwhile, the nine-headed time-devouring ghost carriage is gnawing away at the days and nights of the human world. When the Twenty-Eight Lunar Mansions descend, they discover that the so-called "laws of time" are nothing more than escape codes carved into human bones in the twenty-third century.
