Kiss of Death in Emerald Time

In a dark future where time is currency, memories are the last flesh left to sell.

Zheng Ni, an “Against-the-Clock Blade” with the hourglass in his mind nearly empty, can remember “kill the gray sparrow” only by carving the command into his skin with a scalpel. But on his ninth mission, he falls into an auction house and grabs not his target, but Chen Daodao, a woman clutching an emerald pocket watch. Sealed inside it are the last fragments of his dead mother's memories.

Chen Daodao is a nurse with an angelic face at a nursing home, and the black market's most dangerous memory broker. To buy back the fragments of her mother Lin Xiu's memories, she accepts a deadly assignment: kiss a celebrity's “sweet-kiss pocket watch” with lips stained corpse-blue lipstick. The watch contains a strain of X-type dementia virus.

When a cold scalpel presses against her throat, she calls out the real name he has forgotten: “Zheng Ni.” The call blows open a sealed hell. A killer whose nerves have been gnawed away by nanobots, with ten “spinal torture racks” nailed to his spine, each bearing the resentment of a dying old person. A ruthless nurse, whose uniform hides the tattered old clothes of his dead mother.

“There are ten old people waiting to die inside your head.” She stamps on the tracking trap. “Want to live? Use this pocket watch to make the buyers who feed on time... all go down with us!”

Why did Zheng Ni become the “Against-the-Clock Blade”? What happens when his hourglass runs out? What does the name “Zheng Ni” mean? Why are his mother's memories so important?

Why is Chen Daodao, the angelic nurse, a deadly broker? What connects her to Zheng Ni's mother, Su Qing, and her own mother, Lin Xiu? What is her true purpose in buying back the memories?

Why do the images of Su Qing and Lin Xiu overlap? What do the handwriting in the nursing rules, the floral shirt, and the badge fragments point to?