On a night when the rental house was leaking, Chen Yan picked up an hourglass that had fallen away. The huddled figure in the dark red "grain of sand", the sudden disappearance of neighbor Aunt Wang, and the strange countdown text message on the mobile phone drag this ordinary young man struggling under the pressure of rent into a time and space mystery that spans a century.
What flows in the hourglass is not sand, but the devoured time and soul; his neighbor is not a human, but the "phantom body" that protects him; and he himself is by no means an ordinary person - he is the twin reincarnation of Chen Xuanji, the sandcaster who cast the hourglass a hundred years ago, and he is also the only container that can awaken the time-devouring beast.
When the talking black cat showed its nine tails, when his future self appeared in the mirror holding a blood-stained jade pendant, and when the deal of "exchanging lifespan for the truth" in the pawnshop against time came before him, Chen Yan understood: the so-called adventure is just a contract already written by fate.
The gear maze hides tampered memories, the nine-life contract binds an inseparable bond, and the man in a white coat who looks similar to him is standing at the other end of the rift in time and space, waiting to see him drag the world into chaos with his own hands.
The countdown is ticking, and every choice is tearing parallel time and space apart. Will he become a monster that devours time, or will he use his twin souls to restart the hourglass? Chen Yan held the Sword of Time fused with a jade pendant, and finally saw clearly - all the weirdness and struggles began with the cry of the baby who was injected with a "time controller" in 1999.
