An anomaly at the Sanxingdui archaeological site sent intern Lin Yan tumbling into an otherworld woven from flesh and bronze. Its burning villages worshiped a bronze sacred tree, and its cultivators wielded fragments of laws as blades. The spirit-devouring giant tree looming over the horizon was identical to the bloodstained stele totem at the bottom of the excavation pit.
His father's mysterious disappearance three years ago, the golden time-tracing marks that had appeared on his wrist, and the dying words of the red-robed cultivator Ye Hongyu, "The Eternal Tree is waiting for you." Every clue pointed to an earth-shattering deception spanning ancient Shu and another world.
Spirit-eaters gnawed at the laws, and nine blood moons hung overhead.
Xiao Qingli, known as one of the "Chaos Survivors," bore the mark of a godslayer. Beneath the bronze mask of the Heavenly Ruins Alliance's enforcer elder lay the same protruding-eye pattern as the Sanxingdui gold mask. And when Lin Yan used his Time-Tracing Eye to witness the truth of the divine war, he discovered that the spirit-eater race devoured more than flesh: the suckers writhing on their bone spines were consuming the very "time" of an entire civilization.
So-called eternity was nothing but the scraps left after the gods had chewed.
From the bronzes of Shu to the ruins of another world, from cultivators who practiced spirit-source techniques to the spirit-eater Mother Tree, Lin Yan gradually came to understand: every world was a diseased branch of the Eternal Tree, and he had to become the axe that severed the cycle.
