Chen Mo, a down-on-his-luck game designer, glimpses the truth of the world on the brink of ruin: the neon city is merely a rust-eaten skin stretched over a colossal “sieve.” Labels of fortune, prosperity, and longevity float above everyone’s heads. The poor are strangled by chains of debt, while golden parasites that devour people’s luck crawl over the rich, whose status shines with wealth. After a desperate escape, a bloodstained copper coin merges into his chest, making him the “Reserve God of Wealth,” missing for a thousand years.
To end the chaos of wealth unleashed by the God of Wealth’s disappearance, Chen Mo is forced to reclaim scattered fragments of the deity’s authority. Every success comes at a terrible cost: his sense of taste, the use of his limbs, and his emotions. His wife, Li Wei, slides toward the opposing side in her despair, and is drawn into the maelstrom of a divine war. The path to godhood is the path to losing one’s humanity. When the sieve runs wild and the human world becomes a slaughterhouse, Chen Mo, half his body transformed into bronze, wrings the last of his humanity dry and forges wealth into a golden sword that will burn the world, driving it through the sieve. He ascends to the divine throne, but the price is devastating: his heart is sealed inside a copper coin, his memories are stripped away, and his divine body is fixed forever in the clouds, with only an old scar on his cheek remaining. A new era begins amid the ruins. In the corner of a rusted god’s eye, a golden bead of dying embers holds the last spark of humanity’s undying spirit.
