The story takes place in an era when cognitive immortality and mechanical apocalypse merge. When the protagonist Zhu Boai was forty-five years old, in order to save his hometown town that was eroded by the "cognitive plague", he was forced to practice the "Liuhe Tongxuan Jing", which was regarded as an evil way, and became a puppet master who warmed the puppets with his own essence, blood and soul. In the process of cultivation from "observation of Taoism" to "enlightenment of Taoism", he met Wei Que, a disabled Taoist who firmly believed that "incompleteness is beauty" in the abandoned city "Jinling Ruins", and enlightened "Xiaopan", the first stubborn stone puppet with spiritual intelligence. They jointly faced the challenges of the tide of mechanical beasts, data illusions and cognitive confusion, and gradually became involved in the ideological dispute between the local "perfect monks" and "incomplete Taoists". They also discovered the truth about the cold experiments carried out by "foreign observers" in the starry sky using monks from this world as samples. Zhu Boai uses puppetry to protect the refugees and repair the broken cognitive network. His Taoist intention of "protecting the common people with incompleteness" runs counter to the "perfect experimental body" pursued by the observers. In the end, in the depths of the ocean of consciousness, he used the "Chaos Return Delimiter" to stabilize the underlying logic of the world that was on the verge of collapse, and used the "Jade Disk Pattern of Creation" to enlighten thousands of mechanical wreckage into living beings. He did not prove the Tao with force, but in the form of "promoting the Tao", he built a new system of heaven that allowed incompleteness and perfection to coexist, and the harmony of man and machine, and found the destination of "seeing the true Tao in the absence of Tao".
