The Tea Room at the End of Time

Lin Jue's lifelong dream is to be the most inconspicuous cog in the Bureau of Temporal Order: clock in on time every day, leave at quitting time, and leisurely slack off on the brink of the universe's collapse.

As a "bug fixer," his job is to deal with the "minor glitches in reality" that would make Newton turn in his grave and Einstein nod in approval. For example, fixing an oven that endlessly duplicates spaghetti, or persuading a banyan tree growing on the ceiling, convinced it's a chandelier, to see reason.

He thought he could spend his days filling out endless forms and sipping lukewarm tea, until one day he handled a bug that was "too perfect." From then on, the world's error logs began refreshing at a frantic pace, as tiny cracks in logic gathered into an unfathomable abyss.

Forced out of his comfort zone, the master of slacking reluctantly picks up his "order calibrator" and takes on the immense shadow lurking deep within reality's code.