Beauty is a curse when your body is made of precious stone and the sky is filled with hunters who want to wear your shards as jewelry. On the jagged shores of a dying planet, twenty-eight immortal gems fight a losing battle against the Lunarians—monstrous invaders from the moon who seek to harvest their bodies for decoration. At the bottom of this crystalline hierarchy sits Phosphophyllite, a clumsy, fragile mess with a Mohs hardness of only three-point-five and a heart desperate for glory. Too weak for the front lines and far too brittle to be useful, Phos is saddled with the mundane task of recording a natural history, leading to a fateful meeting with Cinnabar, a gem cursed with toxic mercury and doomed to eternal isolation. What starts as a simple promise to find Cinnabar a better life spirals into a soul-crushing odyssey of physical and psychological transformation. Every time Phos breaks, every time they lose a limb and replace it with something new, a piece of their original self and their memories vanish into the void. This is a breathtaking, surreal masterpiece that explores the harrowing question of what remains of a person once they have sacrificed every part of themselves to become strong.

Seinen manga, Body horror, Existentialism, Crystalline lifeforms, Psychological drama, Post-apocalyptic, Buddhist philosophy, Phosphophyllite, Action fantasy, Mystery