Melchiad Koloman

In a crumbling Bohemian spa town where the gas-lamps flicker like dying suns, a reclusive savant named Melchiad Koloman—equal parts Newton and carnival huckster—unlocks a subterranean theatre of rusted alembics and mercury-scarred retorts. His obsession: to coax the long-cold alchemist Samuel Kapiérus back across the Styx so that the secret of chrysopoeia—gold from base ash—can be torn from the dead man’s lips. Into this sulfurous sanctum stumbles Jadav, a Calcutta fakir who once swallowed fire for the viceroy and now swallows shame, hawking enlightenment like bruised peaches; beside him glides Hachiro, a Kyoto card-sharp in a moth-eaten morning coat whose smile is a switchblade wrapped in rice paper. Together the trio bargain with cholera-ridden gravediggers, bribe a deaf-mute nunnery, and distill moonlight in a church bell, all while the resurrected Kapiérus—half-rotted, half-luminous—whispers equations that melt stone. What follows is not a heist but a séance of matter itself: gold blooms like fungus on corpses, clocks bleed hours backward, and every gram of treasure is paid for in memory, until the living become the bullion they covet.