In the apocalypse, a “time plague” sweeps across the globe, resetting everything each day. Mechanical legions slaughter survivors, mutated creatures hunt them down, and companions die over and over again. This is the eternal nightmare of the rust-eaten wasteland.
Lin Xia, a mecha engineer, is the only “variable” in this infinite loop. Every time he is killed, he wakes up 24 hours earlier with all his memories intact. He soon discovers that the loop stems from the empire’s out-of-control weapon of causality, the “Loom of Fate.” Worse still, each time he dies, more of the real world is covered by a virtual Eden: his comrades become memoryless NPCs, ruins automatically “refresh,” and his own body begins to turn into data.
Guided by the awakened AI “Zero,” Lin Xia uses each rebirth to feverishly gather temporal anchors and reverse-engineer the “Boundary Breaker,” a mecha capable of transcending the real and virtual worlds. But when he finally breaks into the control core, he faces the ultimate truth of the loop: hundreds of versions of himself, utterly corrupted by countless failures.
To break the cycle, he must kill every version of himself across time and space. To accept the cycle is to become a digital prisoner. Faced with this desperate choice, what will Lin Xia do?
