New Rome, a vast city split in two. The elites in the clouds live forever, while the laborers at the bottom are reduced to soul batteries, harvested again and again.
When a reactor collapses with a thunderous crash, Lin Xiu, a low-level scavenger, stops breathing for exactly nine minutes and forty-three seconds while saving his apprentice.
In the gap between life and death, he glimpses a cruel truth: the conglomerate known as the [Torchbearers] deliberately pushes people to the brink of death, squeezing the last embers from ordinary souls to buy the elites endless life.
Reborn from death, he returns carrying the universe's first primordial ember, and the quantum matrix AWARE awakens in his mind.
His spirit can leave his body and pass between reality and illusion; he can replay an enemy's life in a deathbed vision and judge their every sin; in oxygen-starved tunnels, he tears through space, while his domain of white light rewrites the laws of life and death.
For his tortured people, and for his parents, who were reduced to experimental subjects, Lin Xiu will willingly face death again and again, turning the brink of death into power and his soul into a blade.
He will smash the ceiling matrix that keeps human souls penned in, ignite the fire of embers, and launch a rebellion of life and death across the planet against the mighty Torchbearers!
