In 2187 AD, humans discovered that time is not a long river flowing linearly, but a precision instrument full of "gears" and "nodes". When time and space somewhere collapses due to unknown forces, weird glitches such as "the streets that reappear yesterday" and "eternally looping three-fifteen" will appear - and Lu Chen's job is to repair these cracks.
As the youngest technician of the Time Maintenance Bureau, he holds an "anti-entropy wrench" that can dismantle fragments of time and travels through the gaps in collapsed time and space: retrieving the lost 12 seconds in a space station that exploded repeatedly, and repairing tampered historical nodes in a stagnant medieval castle. But as the maintenance mission progresses, Lu Chen discovers that these failures are no accident, and there is a crazy plan to "reshape the world with time fragments" behind them.
What's even more frightening is that every time he repairs the paradox, there will be unexplained gaps in his memory. The strange time scale that emerges out of thin air on his wrist seems to be warning him: the next repair may require him to personally dismantle the traces of his existence. When time becomes a tool that can be tampered with, how can he keep the last piece of unpolluted time and space?
