Beiyang Tianjin Guard, the embalmer Chen Mo has a pair of hands that can "see" the memory of dead objects. A strange convergence allowed him to touch the ancient mechanism in the chest of the gear factory owner, and also awakened the mechanical soul that had been dormant for hundreds of years.
In the abandoned Chenghuang Temple in the west of the city, the statue of the god made of gears began to rotate on its own; Su Qingwan, a restorer from the Cultural Relics Bureau, always heard the call of the engineer coming from the gears late at night. When the deceased's internal organs were replaced by precision gears one after another, and when the dragon veins of the entire city were about to be connected to the ever-moving formation, Chen Mo discovered that this "mechanical ascension" conspiracy was actually connected to the bloodline of his missing grandfather.
Gears devour souls, and human hearts are harder to predict than mechanisms. He must race against time, under the watchful eyes of all forces, to uncover the secrets of the project from a hundred years ago, and prevent the city from turning into a soulless, eternally running mechanical hell.
