A hundred-meter wall of black stone encloses humanity within three concentric rings. Everyone here is bound from birth to a lifetime dictated by invisible threads of fate. The elites of the upper city prolong their lives by devouring their own kind, while the commoners below wait for death in numb resignation. And atop the tower, the “New King” feeds on despair.
Lin Yan was once the biggest coward of them all, until his mother suddenly “disappeared.” The neighbors claimed he had never had a family. Every trace of her had been erased from the records. Only Lin Yan remembered the burn scar on her left hand and her warning: “Don’t trust the light on the tower.” The moment his fear shattered, the world began to reveal itself to him. His neighbors never blinked when they spoke. The baker hid scales and claws. Even time had stopped for the dead, trapping them in endless loops of the day before their deaths.
Those like him, known as “Keepers of the Dead,” found him and revealed a secret: they alone had no threads of fate, making them the only ones who could see the truth, and the beings the New King feared most. But once the New King sensed a threat, the dead became deadly nightmares. Wearing the faces of loved ones, they crept into people’s dreams and killed without mercy if they were recognized.
Armed with an inborn gift for deduction, Lin Yan set out in search of the truth. From the scrap heaps of the lower city to the bone museum in the upper city, he pieced together the prophecy in the Book of Fate amid lies and bloodstains: “Those without threads will sever the threads; the king-slayer will take the throne.” He once believed his mother’s soul could be saved, but watched the person dearest to him turn into a nightmare and vanish completely before his eyes while protecting him. He once pledged with his companions to break their prison, but could only watch them die one by one beneath the grinding gears of the cycle...
