In 2082, Beijing was folded into three levels of space, and the 50 million poor people in the third space only had 4 hours to survive every day. The protagonist Lin Mo, as a "time miner", witnessed the cruel reality of the sudden death of his coworkers due to running out of time, and accidentally discovered a metal plate engraved with ancient codes, which caused the space folding system to malfunction and gave a glimpse of the unlimited time privileges of the first space. In order to save his sick sister, he sneaked into the black market of the second space and met the smuggler Su Li. He was involved in a time theft operation and obtained key data, exposing the "time return" vulnerability of the time bank.
As the investigation deepens, Lin Mo joins the resistance organization "Time Counterers" and learns that the core of the folding system is the "Time Sand Engine" that extracts the life time of the bottom class. The upper class maintains immortality through the law of "conservation of the total amount of time". The team sneaked into the first space and found that the rich man used time to create the immortality potion, and its timer was synchronized with the life countdown of the bottom residents. The Time Management Bureau activated the "Mobius Protocol" to accelerate the squeeze. Lin Mo fell into a 24-hour death loop and relied on Su Li's banned device to escape.
In the final battle, the Timebreakers break into the core of the Time Sand Engine and discover that it is essentially the Giant Hadron Collider. The holographic image of scientist Chu He reveals the "time entropy reduction" plan - everyone's remaining life span is reset to 25 years, but volunteers are required to sacrifice all their time. Su Li volunteered to become a carrier, restarted the global time network, and the folded space gradually disintegrated. Ten years later, Lin Mo became a historian, remembering the dead in front of the monument, while the underground laboratory was still researching "Time Folding 2.0".
