London in the Victorian era was permanently shrouded in "yellow haze" - it was the reverberation of the old gods and the source of power for extraordinary beings: the higher the concentration, the stronger the power and the more intense the alienation. In the slums of the East End, rotten flesh is stuck in the gears of the mechanical slaves; in the Royal Society of the West End, the Difference Engine is secretly calculating the coordinates of the old god's sleep.
Lin Chen, a Chinese scientific researcher, woke up from a sewage ditch, his ears filled with the fear and despair of strangers - this was the curse of the "Whispering Mists" and his survival weapon. Holding the only modern pen (the connection with the past world), he escaped from a steam boiler explosion, predicted life and death in gang fights, and was taken in by Old Gray of the Shadowbound Path. However, due to the missing child case, he was forced to pierce the blood sacrifice conspiracy of the Scarlet Ritual Path.
The Gear Council used mechanical conscription to drain the civilian population, Scarlet Yitu used blood sacrifices to plunder lives, and the sequencers of the nine major paths were promoted based on their "essence", not knowing that they were the nourishment for the resurrection of the old gods. Lin Chen transformed from a survivor into a "variable": he formed an alliance with the lie weaver Eve but was betrayed, sneaked into the Difference Engine Research Bureau to fight against Karen's mechanical tyranny, and witnessed the decisive sacrifice of the Deep Sea Order under the Obsidian Gate.
In the depths of the haze, the old gods offer "chaos in exchange for tranquility"; the tip of the pen carries the obsession of countless civilians to "survive". When plunder becomes the only law of the extraordinary and protection becomes a luxury, Lin Chen will eventually understand: the end of the retrograde path is never to become a god, but to use the atomized body to weave the light of "protection" for the fog city - even if the cost is to be forgotten by everyone, leaving only a pen to convey the whispers across reincarnation in time and space.
