Shen Zhao, a freelance photographer, finds a thorn-covered pocket watch stopped at 9:47 in an antique shop in London, triggering a time curse that spans a century. The mysterious shopkeeper, Gu Qingya, is an immortal imprisoned by time. The bleeding thorn tattoo on his wrist marks a countdown to death across seven lunar cycles.
When Shen Zhao discovers that the car accident three years ago was the beginning of her memories being altered, she realizes that the visions that surface on every rainy night, of a shipwreck in 1912 and an air raid in 1940, are all part of the Time Administration’s Theseus Project, a cloning experiment. To break the quantum cocoon inside the bronze coffin, she must travel through seven layers of time and recover her fragmented memories: a letter from the Edwardian era, the trace of a kiss in a World War II air-raid shelter, skeletons embracing in a sunken ship beneath an icy sea...
In this game against smugglers of time, the most dangerous wager is Gu Qingya, whose heart is embedded with malachite. At the end of every cycle, he repeats: “When you count through the ninth waning moon, you’ll understand that we died long ago, inside the bronze pocket watch from the day we first met.”
