The story takes place in Lin Yuan City, on the edge of the Kan Palace. The protagonist, Shen Yueze, is trapped in a thirty-three-day time loop after accidentally becoming entangled with a fragment of the River of Time. In every loop, he watches his mentor sacrifice himself to activate the Xuanming Ice Soul Curse and seal a rift, protecting the city’s people before his soul is utterly destroyed. After countless futile attempts, the dormant soul of the Black Tortoise within Shen Yueze begins to awaken from repeated contact with the power of time, granting him a faint ability to influence the loop. He meets Su Wan, a blind guqin player who possesses the Fate-Breaking Zither and can briefly pluck the strings of cause and effect, though doing so brings her terrible backlash. He also meets Lu Mingyuan, a cultivator from the Kun Palace’s Daoist Sect of Nature who believes in governing through nonaction. To break the loop and save his mentor, Shen Yueze sets out in search of the legendary Nine Netherworld Reincarnation Fruit, said to stabilize space and time. This quest draws him into a thousand-year contest between the “Rewriteers of Fate” and the “Guardians of Space and Time.” He gradually discovers that his mentor’s death was no accident, but a sacrifice intended to trigger a crucial “node of cause and effect” in a larger conspiracy. While cultivating the demon soul and mastering the Prajna Ferrying Art, Shen Yueze must find a “third path” among countless intertwined prophecies and timelines: one that does not rely on forceful interference, yet can guide all things toward harmonious order. In the end, he gives up the chance to become an all-knowing, all-powerful Demon Emperor who controls everything. Instead, he makes himself an anchor and unites the power of the Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams to create a “Vortex of Order” in the River of Time, where mistakes and chance are allowed to exist and all things can evolve of their own accord. He becomes its eternal watcher.
