[This is not a power fantasy! This is not a power fantasy! This is not a power fantasy! Important things must be said three times.] Zhou Ming, a 32-year-old Chinese American detective, finds a letter that should not exist in his office in Chinatown, with the doors and windows locked from the inside.
Cream-colored parchment, a dark red wax seal, and half a torn rose pressed into the wax. The letter has no postmark or return address, yet it appears precisely on his desk, beside the belongings his partner left behind two months ago. His partner is dead, of natural causes. The coroner signed off on it, and all that remains of his belongings is an album of nineteenth-century London street scenes. Half a rose is drawn on the album’s title page. The wax seal bears the same half-rose.
He lays the envelope over the album. The emblems match. Spire to spire, arched window to arched window, even the broken fragment at the top of the clock tower aligns perfectly.
As if someone knew which page he would turn to.
Zhou Ming slices through the wax seal.
He is dragged into a place called the “Fogbound Hub”: a world of eternal fog, Victorian gas lamps, and cobblestone streets, where a man speaking with a London accent tells him, “This is the reincarnation space. You must enter the instances and make it back alive.”
The first instance is a Gothic castle. The eyes in the oil paintings follow you. The sound of high heels in the corridor draws closer and closer. A blood-red contract lies hidden in the basement.
He makes it out alive.
Then comes the second castle. Then the third. Each one is darker, deeper, and more like it was made just for him. Gradually, he realizes the instances aren’t random. They’re responding to him, watching him, learning his weaknesses.
