Lin Jianbai is admitted to Haiyuan University, a top school in a bustling metropolis, expecting a life of learning, youthful friendships, and ordinary days. Then his roommate vanishes under mysterious circumstances on a stormy night, leaving behind only a notebook filled with distorted symbols that make anyone who stares at them too long feel dizzy. Campus urban legends begin to spread: eerie echoes in the midnight corridors, a thirteenth row of bookshelves that shouldn't exist deep inside the library... To his horror, Lin Jianbai discovers that he may be the only one who can sense these abnormalities and remain clear-headed.
He is recruited by the secretive Anomalous Phenomena Investigation Division (API) and steps onto a battlefield hidden in the shadows. There, he meets teammates with wildly different personalities: Chu Yao, a forceful upperclasswoman from the archaeology department who can casually slice open rifts in space; Su Xiao, a math genius and hacker who uses equations to predict an evil god's next move with pinpoint accuracy; and Shen Zhaozhao, the cold-faced top student at the medical school, who domesticates the cells of ancient gods in petri dishes and turns them into biological weapons.
When the phantom of Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent encircling the world in Norse mythology, appears above the campus, and Cthulhu's fleet of Deep Ones rises from the murky waves of the Huangpu River, the Eastern Zhulong bloodline within Lin Jianbai awakens with a thunderous roar at the brink of life and death. He is a descendant of the primordial dragon of creation, master of time and light. Yet an even greater shadow has already descended. The quiet literature student Yun Li, who is always reading in a corner of the library with an innocent smile, has a signature on the title page of her ancient book that belongs to the many-faced god who makes all beings tremble: Nyarlathotep. The world's collapse has only just begun. Can an ancient bloodline carve out a chance of survival for humanity in the games of the Old Ones?
