When antique restorer Lu Zhao touches a bloodstained gear, the “Red Raincoat Disappearance Spree” that shocked the city twenty years ago quietly begins again. The silver pocket watch of Shen Xingwan, a hyperthymesia sufferer whose family member went missing, is forever stopped at 19:47. A former state security agent known as Old K’s stopwatch has stopped at the coordinates of the 1998 case. And Lu Zhao’s ability to see visions through objects lets him witness the final six seconds of the dead in the clicking gears: a gear in a pool of blood, twisted clockwork parts, and a flash of a crimson raincoat.
The clockmaker dismemberment in the old city, the suffocation in the subway tunnel, the jewel exhibition’s sealed-room disappearance... Each seemingly unrelated murder hides a broken gear pointing to the serial mystery from twenty years ago. When Lu Zhao discovers that the burn on the back of his neck flares in sync with the time markings at the crime scenes, and Shen Xingwan’s hyperthymesia flashes reveal a bloody lie buried deep in her memories, every clue points to a terrifying truth: the killer is not human, but a “Time Prisoner” trapped in a temporal cage from 1998 to 2025. Through a series of murders, he is reconstructing the coordinates of space-time, trying to recover “that day,” crushed by fate, from where the bloodstained gears mesh.
This is an intricate investigation pairing an antique restorer with a woman who remembers everything, a deadly meshing of mechanical gears and human memory, and a redemption spanning twenty years. When the final gear slots into the clock of death, listen: from inside the rusted gearbox comes the ticking of a countdown.
