Sometimes, a seemingly small event can trigger an explosion. In New York City, in the time of Corona, an eccentric surgeon is forced to watch helplessly as a seismic disruption in human rights and freedom unfurls right before his eyes. On the opposite side of the world in Wuhan, another physician/historian and expert in the Tao uncovers suspicious and murderous circumstances in the death of Wenliang Li, one of the first tragic casualties of the era that launched a worldwide coup. The seductively beautiful Cara Liu subsequently escapes from the clutches of her authoritarian regime by a seemingly miraculous granting of asylum in the United States.

Yet the West itself subsequently becomes completely consumed by an unstoppable and self-reinforcing moral panic created by a perfect storm of factors from media exaggeration to primitive fear to the desire for political control and profiteering. Failing to discover an easy solution, they find they are alone yet together as a tiny minority of the population in the quest to set the world back on a course towards liberty. To make matters more difficult, the two are seemingly haunted by the ghosts of a prior invasion of New York City from more than two hundred years earlier. In the parallel story that unfolds, two frontier scouts, seeking to pursue land in the Ohio country for their patron are frustrated in their efforts by the outbreak of the American Revolution, forcing them to pick a side to support, causing them to become more embroiled deeper into the conflict itself.

Can the pair of disenfranchised physicians learn enough from the apparitions of the past to be steered towards a useful solution to the societal woes, or further into insanity? Will they intersect with the path of their predecessors?