Zhou Mingrui, a modern-day Chinese man, wakes up disoriented and covered in blood, transplanted into the body of Klein Moretti, a university graduate who has apparently just killed himself. The world he finds himself in resembles late-Victorian England, but running underneath its guns, airships, and difference engines is a hidden layer of ritual magic: potions, divination, sealed artifacts, and a secretive network of "Beyonders" who trade sanity and humanity for supernatural pathways of power.
Determined to understand what happened to the real Klein and to find a way home, Zhou Mingrui reconstructs a ritual that grants him occult abilities of his own. He begins operating under a masked identity, forming an occult circle while quietly working his way into the world's official orthodox churches of Beyonders. As he rises through the ranks, he uncovers a much larger, stranger conspiracy binding gods, secret societies, and eldritch forces together, one investigation at a time.
The first volume sets up a slow-building mystery soaked in gaslamp fantasy and Lovecraftian dread, following an ordinary man forced to become an extraordinary, morally compromised investigator of the unknown.