Meng Fan has 180 days left to live. He returns to his old family home in Jiangxi to await death, and discovers among his grandfather’s belongings a miniature sandbox. He can create worlds inside it and control the flow of time, but for every civilization he destroys, he must personally endure the fear and despair its people feel in their final moments.
From a crawling-human tribe drowned by a single cup of water to Emperor Sui kneeling and asking, “What does God see in us?” From Shennong going blind after tasting herbs and saying, “Someone is crying in the sky,” to the Stone Monkey smashing the firmament with a single punch and shouting for him to come out for a drink. Meng Fan extends his life with one apocalypse after another, but over the long years of observation, these beings calling him “God” slowly chip away at his heart.
In the end, two choices lie before him: detonate the sandbox and recover, or sacrifice himself to give the sandbox independence. He chooses a fourth path: transform all the energy into a Tree of Reincarnation, preserving every civilization forever in memory. The price is that the final thirty days of his life are locked in an endless loop, never reaching their end.
On the threshold of the old house, he folds his medical record into a paper airplane one last time and sends it flying into the sunset.
