The Steam Sequence

When the roar of steam engines echoed across the Old Continent, smoke thick enough to blot out the sky washed away the delusions of an age of ignorance. As faith crumbled, the ancient myths and legends of the past became the stuff of jokes and gossip.

Amid the billowing steam, people shed the tattered garments of the Dark Age, stood firm above the world, and gazed into the future.

But they failed to notice that in shadowed crevices where steam could not seep, the hidden things lurking in the dark side of human history were slowly awakening.

Root taboos, ancient deities, and primordial aberrations cast covetous eyes upon the protagonist of the fourth millennium: the [steam engine].

They sought to use it to descend upon the world and drag it back into an ancient and cruel age of myth. Humanity would once again relive the despairing history of enslavement and torment.

…

In the fifth year after transmigrating, Jiang Qin, who suffered from lung disease, went bankrupt.

He had no choice but to travel between the factories and new shipping routes of Dailan City, trying to find a way to pay off his life-shortening debts as quickly as possible. By chance, he witnessed the mysterious things the world was doing its utmost to conceal

He saw with his own eyes as his old friend dissolved and rotted into an indescribable mass of stitched-together flesh.

The crimson blade in his hand, engraved with seven blood grooves shaped like snake scales, whispered softly to him:

“Hatred whispers in the mists, the Serpent God schemes in the coal smoke, and the gift of lung disease has arrived in all its glory.”

“Forty Mythic Sequences are about to return.”

“Jiang Qin, will you choose steam and coal smoke, or myth and sequences?”

“Or will you choose humanity, or me?”