When the pocket watch strikes three in the morning and runs backward, raindrops outside the 23rd-floor office flow upward, forming a vortex through time
Three months after her father goes missing, overworked office drone Lin Xiaoman accidentally activates the ancestral pocket watch's "Anchor of Reversed Time" and is swept into a century-long war between the Time Administration and the Reversers. She discovers that the moon after 1900 is a tampered "gear anchor point," that everyone's memories are reset every 137 cycles, and that she is the only "original" who has never been erased.
As the gear-shaped mark on her wrist awakens, she moves between the clock repairer's mechanical eye on Clockwork Alley, the barcode secret of the qipao-clad Su Li, and the truth behind the Reversers' crumbling hourglasses. Little by little, she uncovers the shocking conspiracy her father hid in the "Time Patchworker's Handbook": the Time Administration lubricates its gears with deaths in war, the Reversers harvest lifespans by turning hourglasses backward, and the real moon was sealed deep beneath the Gear Sea long before 1900.
As cracks in the pocket watch reveal the countdown to the 138th reset, Lin Xiaoman must use her own blood to activate the "Time Anchor" and choose between the reversing hourglass and the murderous compass: Will she become a patchworker who repairs the false timeline, or shatter the gears and let the true moonlight shine upon the world?
"Every time the Reversers hunt you down, time is asking: Do you dare to stop your life from repeating itself?"
