Seven years ago, on the Zero Moment, 3.17 seconds vanished from the world’s time. All of humanity lost its memories at once.
From that day on, people began awakening to professions.
Doctors could stitch shut rifts in space, lawyers could force contracts to be fulfilled, and architects could rewrite the structure of cities. The more society needed a profession, the greater its power.
Gu Ting ran a watch repair shop on the verge of closing when he awakened what was widely considered the most useless profession: watchmaker.
He had only one ability: touch a target and restore the three seconds of time it had lost.
He couldn’t rewind the past, stop the world, or even hurt anyone.
Then, the first time he restored a wounded person’s missing memories, he made a horrifying discovery:
Everyone in Linjiang City had lost the exact same three seconds from yesterday.
Those three seconds had never disappeared. Someone had quietly calibrated them out of the timeline.
His father, missing for seven years, left behind one final message:
“If every clock is three seconds slow, don’t look for time. Look for the person who shouldn’t exist.”
Restore the three seconds missing from a wound, and the dead can leave a final message.
Restore the three seconds lost to a jammed gun, and a killing can be turned around in an instant.
Restore the three seconds missing from an entire city, and he will bear every debt owed to time, vanishing completely from everyone’s memory.
The craft most cast aside by the age just happens to hold the power to calibrate the deepest rules of the world.
