The world shattered in a temporal shockwave, civilization collapsed into a wasteland, and humanity huddled in the Gray Nest outpost, clinging to life by containing forbidden objects. Transmigrator Zhou Che wakes up strapped to a life-or-death roulette wheel: a rune-engraved revolver with six bullets, only one of which is a dud. He has to spin the cylinder and choose between killing someone else or being killed. With every wager, he mortgages another piece of his soul to a forbidden object. In the depths of despair, Zhou Che discovers that every day at midnight he can bring the world to an absolute halt for one minute. During that minute, everything stops, and only he can think, move, and touch things. He uses that minute to swap bullets and lay traps, repeatedly cheating death at the gambling table. From then on, he pretends to be a deranged gambler, acting the fool by day and using his time stop at night to steal supplies and evade pursuers. But the wasteland is far more complicated than he imagined: consciousness amalgamations slumber within forbidden objects, the official containment agency known as the Temporal Bureau secretly gathers fragments of time, and the abilities of every survivor point to an ancient prophecy: the Lord of Time is coming to reset everything. Forced to join an expedition team exploring forbidden objects, Zhou Che battles mutated beasts across the gray wasteland and gathers lost second hands in temporal rifts. He must use his limited minute to gamble on infinite possibilities, or time will stand still forever.
