Steam roared endlessly through Nottingham. Gears ground the flesh and blood of the downtrodden, while black smoke swallowed the last of the daylight. The boy Lin Mo awoke in the slums, two lifetimes of souls crammed into one frail body. Hidden against his chest was a rusted badge. When the Eye of Chaos opened, whispers of “Sequences” and “Essences” seeped into his bones.
By day, he was an apprentice in a machine workshop, at the mercy of others and struggling to survive among red-hot steel. By night, the sinister information that surfaced on the badge clung to him like a curse: the mandibles of an iron beetle concealed the key to advancement, an ancient contract flowed through a mechanical core, and at the end of the “Repairer” Sequence lay the gaze of the abyss.
When the foreman’s copper staff came down, when inhuman snarls rose from the shadows, Lin Mo tightened his grip on his wrench. Would he be a gear ground to pieces, or the secret wheel that pried the world apart?
The gears kept turning, and the abyss never looked away.
