Elara is the last of her kind. A practitioner of a forgotten and dangerous Tibetan ritual, she walks the city streets as a spiritual janitor, confronting the manifestations of humanity's sorrow. Her method is unique: she asks three questions to draw out the psychic demons born of grief and rage, then offers them a feast of her own spirit to grant them peace.

But when a routine cleansing in a cemetery leaves behind a strange, persistent psychic scar, Elara realizes the city's despair is no longer random. A wave of bizarre emotional plagues begins to sweep through the populace?from sudden, unreasoning panic on a subway platform to a hilarious but malicious rage-monster made of library books and bureaucratic frustration. Each incident bears the same, deliberate signature.

Her investigation leads her to Leo Chen, a brilliant but skeptical data analyst who has been tracking the same phenomena as statistical anomalies on his own conspiracy forums. He sees the patterns in the data; she feels them in her soul. Forging an unlikely alliance that pits ancient ritual against modern technology, they uncover a terrifying truth: these are not random hauntings. They are calculated attacks, orchestrated by a powerful entity known as the Herald, a "gardener of despair" cultivating the city's fear for a dark purpose.

Drawn into a direct confrontation, Elara and Leo must race to disrupt the Herald's symphony of fear before it consumes the city. But they soon learn that defeating this powerful being only reveals a more horrifying truth: the Herald is merely a tool, and its master is a vast, cosmic intelligence with plans to eradicate the chaotic "mess" of life itself. The first battle in a much larger war has just been won, and the road ahead is shrouded in an enemy's shadow.