The deep sea hides secrets sharper than death.
The coastal town of Rust has been shrouded in the "salt frost curse" for generations. Deadly salt crystals precipitate from the bones of the townspeople with the tide. Only the venom soaked in the mermaid's tear glands can survive. Sea Burialist Lu Zhao was born with different eyes and had deep-sea squid cells transplanted into his retina. His tears will etch forbidden sea maps on his skin. Mechanical reformer Shen Hen has an anglerfish-powered heart embedded in his left chest, and his blood is filled with radiation dust from the Showa era. Every heartbeat counts down to awakening the old warships on the bottom of the sea.
A shipwreck intertwined the fates of the two: Lu Zhao found three hundred clones of himself in the sunken ship left behind by his father. Each corpse's skull was engraved with Shen Hui's genetic code; Shen Hui's mechanical tentacles pulled out the surveillance video of his mother being made into an "eternal life battery" from the sea lily between Lu Zhao's ribs. When they touch each other's scars, they exchange memories. The kiss triggers a quantum tide, and they are forced to witness each other's bloodiest past in the time and space cycle - the rainy night when seven-year-old Lu Zhao implanted mechanical gills for Shen Hen, which was the beginning of Shen Hen's transformation into a war weapon.
When the five hundred weddings in the Abyss Church kicked off at the same time, the rusty townspeople collectively knelt to the hydrothermal vents, and the blood of the two condensed into a paradox wedding ring in the four-dimensional space: Shen Hen used the black hole singularity to reshape Lu Zhao's quantum heart, and Lu Zhao used dark matter to cast the Cthulhu Oath for Shen Hen. In this cause-and-effect storm that spans eighty years, love and betrayal grow into symbiotic barnacles in the bones - they are each other's only antidote and a destined sacrifice.
Intent: The paradox of finding freedom in the eternal cycle