Seraphina resurfaces at Blackthorn Manor after two decades away, expending her mortal life force in a forbidden incantation to rescue an innocent child from demonic hunters. The spell preserves the youth but rapidly drains Seraphina's vitality, leaving her with a strict midnight countdown before her soul extinguishes. In frantic desperation, her kin dispatch an urgent summons to Lian Worth, a legendary physician carrying the sole restorative elixir capable of reversing necrotic decay.
Aboard the transcontinental express, petty aristocratic spite threatens everything when an entitled noblewoman brands Lian an impostor and deliberately shatters the medicine vial across the rails. Scraping precious drops from the gravel as clocks toll across the province, Lian races toward the estate against aristocratic sabotage and family misconceptions. To save Seraphina before the final bell strikes, he must gamble with a forbidden life-transference ritual that binds the fatal curse directly into his own veins.
