Who’s Lighting the Lanterns? The Tuner of All Worlds

[Slow burn, rule-based horror, suspense and wild ideas, Lovecraftian horror, infinite worlds, a richly imagined setting, neoclassical cyber-fantasy]

[Cool-headed mind games, decisive and ruthless, hard-hitting worldbuilding, a tragic ensemble cast, a deeply unconventional story]

At dusk in Linyuan City, the rules are rotting.

Xie Yideng is an unremarkable craftsman in the city, carrying an ancient bronze lamp of unknown origin.

The lamp can reveal “things that should not exist,” mend cracks in the rules, and briefly restore normality to a warped world.

The price is that each time he lights it, he is forced to gaze upon a vision of the world’s total destruction.

He had planned to carry the lamp and scrape out a living in this collapsing age of chaos.

Until

The Bureau of Celestial Order, the embodiment of absolute order, labeled him the world’s number-one source of contamination and issued a global warrant for his arrest;

The Breachers, who worship the end of all things, fervently hailed him as the incarnate Son of God and were willing to burn everything for him;

And the Silent Blade, capable of erasing all existence, had already started the countdown to his death from the shadows.

Caught at the heart of the struggle between order and chaos, Xie Yideng slowly raised the ancient lamp.

Its flame flickered, reflecting endless destruction, yet lighting a path no one had ever walked.

“Your paths have all reached dead ends.”

“From this day on, I will reconcile the rules of all worlds.”

Order wants me dead. Chaos worships me as a god.

But my path is to make the world burn anew!