Lord of Mysteries, Vol. 1

Zhou Mingrui, a man from modern China, wakes up covered in blood in a body that is not his. It belongs to Klein Moretti, a university graduate who seems to have just taken his own life. Zhou has no idea how he got there.

The world around him looks like late-Victorian England, with guns, airships and difference engines. Beneath that surface runs a hidden order of ritual magic: potions, divination and sealed artifacts. A secretive network of Beyonders follows supernatural pathways of power, and the price is paid in sanity and humanity.

Zhou wants to learn what happened to the real Klein and to find a way home. He reconstructs a ritual that gives him occult abilities, then takes on a masked identity and forms an occult circle. At the same time he works his way quietly into the orthodox churches of Beyonders and climbs their ranks.

Each investigation uncovers more of a larger and stranger conspiracy that ties gods, secret societies and eldritch forces together. This is gaslamp fantasy with Lovecraftian dread, and the first volume is a slow-building mystery. Its protagonist is an ordinary man pushed into the role of a morally compromised investigator of the unknown.