History can be altered, but who pays the price?
While sorting through his father's belongings, physics graduate student Lin Shen discovers a bronze fragment etched with strange patterns. When it touches the crescent-shaped birthmark on his shoulder, he is hurled back to 213 BCE, to the scene of Qin Shi Huang's book burning and burying of scholars. He must return within 24 hours, or be trapped in history forever.
This is only the beginning.
Lin Shen soon discovers that history is full of "unnatural" traces:
- Modern management concepts have been mixed into Wang Mang's reforms.
- The advanced smallpox prevention techniques of the Song dynasty have suddenly been lost.
- The Industrial Revolution, which should have begun in China, has inexplicably shifted to Britain.
Together with his childhood friend Chen Mo, who can sense the memories of artifacts, and the mysterious historian Zhao Qinian, Lin Shen forms a team to investigate the truth. They discover that every alteration points to the same purpose: to prevent the birth of a "temporal fixation technology" in 2025.
And the founder of this technology is none other than Lin Shen's mother, who supposedly "died in a car accident."
When Lin Shen finally returns to the day his mother was murdered, he discovers that the killer is... himself, from the future.
A desperate reflection of him, corrupted after countless failed attempts to save his mother, determined to prevent the technology from being created by the most extreme means.
Now Lin Shen faces a final choice:
- Kill his mother, prevent the technology, and secure a "peaceful" future?
- Let the technology be created, risking history being fixed forever?
- Or seek a third path, a dangerous road no one has ever taken?
