Five hundred years ago, a solar flare struck the world, devastating the planet in an apocalypse known as the Unleashing. Soon afterwards, the mysterious energy field known as the Rddhi emerged and could be manipulated and utilized by humans known as cultivators. Widely distrusted and despised, considered mutants even, cultivators banded together into groups, such as the Sect Hidden in the Mountains, away from the prying eyes of men. Meanwhile, the wastelands gradually rebuilt themselves, forming powerful countries perpetually at odds with one another. With the backing of regional hegemon Elysia, the city of Quinsigamond dominated the land of the Arcadians until revolution broke out.
The Sect Hidden in the Mountains split into factions over whether to remain neutral in human affairs or join the revolt. The subsequent civil war destroyed the sect; its victors, led by the hero Viola Reed and her companions Derek Domino and Theodore Greylock, departed the mountain to support the revolution, which was led by Viola’s father Arthur. Arcadian victory in their War of Independence came at the Battle of Quinsigamond, which marked the foundation of the modern Arcadian nation-state. But all was not well; Viola sacrificed her life to secure victory in the final battle, Greylock and his Theodites tried to overthrow the new government until they were defeated by Domino, and as Arcadia grew stronger, Elysia and her neighbors, Lawrence and Eidolon, invaded in a preemptive strike. Arcadia was ruined; she quickly became indebted to one of the world’s strongest powers, the nation of Zhanghai, which rebuilt Arcadia at the cost of controlling the country’s railroads, infrastructure, manufacturing, ports, and anything else of value.
A new military junta came to power in Arcadia. Governor Pulaski commands the country; Chief Emmitt Amien of the State Police - Arcadia’s internal security force - issues orders in his name. The State Police and Zhanghai ensure the loyalty of the citizenry, their agents regularly patrolling the country, disappearing anyone who poses a threat to the regime and its backers. Cultivators, once a rarity, have slowly been growing in number, with all three branches of the military - State Police, Army, and Navy - recruiting them as soldiers. How to unlock the Rddhi and become a cultivator remains largely unknown, with leading theories including bloodline inheritance and trauma-induced activation.
Isaac Spallacio isn't interested in any of that. He’s just a miner in the backwater town of Patuxet and prefers the safety of the darkness over the danger of being in the light. But danger calls for him - his brother Gregory and his best friend Kassandra become involved in a plot against the junta. At his university, State Police officers mortally wound Greg, who has just enough time to make it back to Patuxet, hand Isaac his final will, and warn him of rising threats he's discovered. A vast conspiracy seeks to control not just Arcadia, but the entire world. Isaac must also beware a mysterious woman known as the Gardener, who apparently lived six years from now and traveled back in time to the present.
Grieving for his dead brother and utterly in shambles, Isaac tries to collect himself at a midnight matinee. There, he is accosted by the cultivator Alfie, a university associate of Greg who demands Isaac hand over anything belonging to his deceased brother. Forced into a fight-or-flight situation where cultivation is the only answer if he wishes to win, Isaac unlocks Rddhi manipulation, enabling him to attack with superpowered fists. Isaac defeats Alfie, who is then collected by Hibiscus Reed, a cultivator and cadet in the Arcadian Navy who’s been tracking him. Reed offers to enroll Isaac directly in the Navy as a cultivator; Isaac has unfinished business and declines. Reed departs with Alfie, saying she’ll be back in Patuxet soon for one final offer.
Isaac and Kassandra, pursued by corporate samurai and officers, find Greg’s journal in a pre-Unleashing bunker for the “Department of Domestic Security”. The journal cryptically posits that mankind tried to reach Heaven five hundred years ago. State Police officers Symanski and Ludvig, Symanski inhumane in his morals and Ludvig inhumane in him being some sort of patchwork equivalent of a human, capture Kassandra and Isaac. Kassandra is to be brought to a Dr. Oswald at the Castle, the State Police’s largest prison facility, while Symanski tortures Isaac on the spot for more information. Symanski burns Greg’s journal but then Reed arrives, incapacitating the officer and rescuing Isaac. Only one page remains, speaking of a Jasiel Abderrahmane Njord. With nothing else left for him in Patuxet, and deciding to take down the conspiracy Greg warned of, Isaac joins Reed in the Navy, becoming a recruit for the Cultivator Marines. When he departs from Patuxet, only Isaac notices the Gardener seeing him off at the station. For a brief moment, he realizes she looks nearly identical to Reed, but his vision ends and he forgets about the encounter.
Reed takes Isaac to the main Cultivator Marine base in the country - Elizabeth Pond in the capital city of Narragansett. Isaac realizes that Reed is quite unpopular in the Navy; not only does she belong to the Reed family, which controls the Navy’s major competitor - the Army - but Reed herself is an arrogant piece of work as well. After a run-in with Reed’s haughty comrade Mackenzie Cartwright, Isaac and Reed cross paths with a protest led by the speaker Zola, who promises to restore mankind to an ancient utopia called Kallipolis. Many of those in attendance of the speech - the Restorationists, as those seeking Kallipolis are called - are arrested by the State Police, including Zola himself.
After arriving at Elizabeth Pond, Isaac is granted the rank of Midshipman and is placed in Cadet Squadron 3, which is led by Chief Midshipman Reed and their new comrade, the hot-headed Barbara “Babs” Morang. Babs takes Isaac out to her old stomping grounds in the city’s ghettos; she’s also looking to change this country for the better, so the two vow to help each other pursue their goals. Babs' similarity to Kassandra helps comfort Isaac about her capture, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. Isaac also meets some of the other cultivator cadets: the skittish Lynn Falls and Mackenzie’s younger brother, the even more arrogant Keiran, belong to Mackenzie’s Squad 1; Squad 2 is commanded by laidback wannabe-actor Dan Turner and includes the big man Demetrius Diakos along with the quiet Oksana and her pet snakes. Isaac struggles at first, becoming rivals with Kieran, but with the aid of Reed and Babs, he’s able to surpass him. Isaac also struggles with the inspections of Officer Connor of the Naval Police - another Naval subbranch - only managing to keep his journal page secret with a well-timed bribe. With those obstacles passed, Isaac grows stronger. A cultivator's power is graded on a scale of 8 tiers divided into three subtiers - Isaac goes from Circuit 1A to 1B, enabling the head of the Cultivator Marines, the technocratic bureaucratic researcher General Josiah Stockham, to activate Squad 3 for their first mission.
A pair of Restorationists - Panama, filled with righteous fury for vengeance, and Jackson, an easy-going mercenary - have been smuggling drugs through the cargo ship Melusine at the port city of Fore River. With the aid of Lieutenant “Checkers” Derry and his team of conventional marines - the gun-toting, oorah-ing ground force of the Combined Fleet, another Naval subbranch - Squad 3 storms the Melusine, finding it guarded by a whole cultivator force. Isaac struggles with the idea of fighting rebels on behalf of a junta he opposes. Below deck, Reed, armed with her Domino Sword that can emit sound waves, fights Panama, who reveals he joined the Restorationists after his close friend Myra was murdered by the junta in a story eerily reminiscent of Isaac’s. Panama with his viscosity power severely injures Reed, but she kills him with a well-timed blow.
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Isaac and Babs then confront Jackson, who traps them in an illusion. Isaac breaks the spell and captures him. However, Isaac is distracted by a mysterious container bearing an even more mysterious symbol; everything suddenly explodes. When he comes to, Babs explains Jackson activated a suicide vest, destroying the crate in the process. Having seen his close friends come close to death, Isaac finds his resolve - now that he’s made his choice to join the Navy, he must follow it through to the end, and he’s fighting for the people next to him now as well. The Restorationists fund their war chest through drug smuggling and other criminal operations; Isaac decides that he’ll seek change in a way that brings less harm to others. Reed, meanwhile, reveals to Isaac she suffers from an utter lack of interest in anything in the world, but seeks to change that - she wants to Want. To find herself.
Reed also identifies Isaac’s symbol as the one for atomic weaponry. Stockham elaborates on the aftermath of the Unleashing - not only did the solar flare sunder the planet, humanity sundered it further when the nations of the day unleashed their atomic arsenals upon one another. Considering that the Restorationists have been picking up drugs at a Zhanghai treaty port across the sea, it’s highly likely they picked up the container bearing atomic material there as well. As to what end…that remains to be seen. For his reward, Isaac is granted access to the research books and material of the Naval Archives.
Isaac resumes his training, finding himself frustrated with both Kieran’s taunts and lack of progress with that lone clue from his brother - Jasiel Abderrahmane Njord. He does make progress with his cultivation overall - he unlocks a meridian in his right palm, enabling him to learn the cultivation Art known as the Fists of Anji, which allows him to fire electric blasts out of his right fist. Squad 3 squares off against Squad 1 in a friendly sparring match; Isaac defeats Kieran but ultimately falls short against Mackenzie, who takes victory. Afterwards, Mackenzie visits Isaac in the hospital, revealing herself to be a driven, ambitious member of the Cartwright family, a former cultivator sect turned merchant group that finances the Navy. Upon hearing Hibiscus of the competing Reed family had enlisted in the Navy, Mackenzie set out to become her rival, only to find that Reed uses her arrogance to hide her lack of skill and passion, such as not being able to use the Rddhi without the aid of the Domino Sword. Mackenzie had noticed a recent change in Reed and thanks Isaac for it. As for Kieran - Isaac deduces he’s a bastard due to his dissimilar appearance and cultivation ability compared to Mackenzie.
Isaac realizes Jasiel Abderrahmane Njord is an acronym for JAN, and then leads him to a dusty tome in the Naval Archives. Isaac discovers that a Professor Jan wrote a book about a Rddhi cryptography code called the Kyznosis Perception Art once used by Viola Reed before largely being surpassed and forgotten. Suspecting that the powerless Greg had a cultivator disguise his writings in Kyznosis, Isaac begins studying the Art from the book, first painfully unlocking a meridian in his eye to enable him to learn the power. He also uses the Naval Archives to expand his knowledge on the world in general - apparently, humans evolved from monkeys, and these first monkey-men were a people known as the Greeks, whom Viola Reed had a fascination with.
A struggling Kieran begs Isaac to help him train. Isaac reluctantly accepts, deciding to return the favor for all the times he’s been helped along the way. The two slowly become acquaintances and the widely disliked Kieran becomes accepted by the group, even apologizing to Reed for taunting her about being the black sheep of her family. Reed previously revealed to Isaac that she ran away from home and with nowhere else to escape her powerful family, she joined the Navy. She then invites Squads 1, 2, and 3 to her one hobby - watching movies at the local cinema.
The three squads have a night out in town. At a bar, Kieran thanks Isaac for helping him, and the two engage in a drunken brawl with disrespectful Army cultivator cadets. When heading through a local park, Isaac and Kieran are suddenly attacked by the Eight-Steps Killer Sam, a cultivator assassin who demands Isaac hand over the journal page. Isaac refuses, and Sam wounds both Isaac and Kieran, who manage to escape by the skin of their teeth. The more-injured Kieran is healed by a special cultivator pill commissioned by his father - Mr. Cartwright - who demands Stockham seek revenge (and glory for the family) by having Mackenzie and Kieran lead a mission against Sam’s employer - Machigonne Importer/Exporter, a shell company for the Restorationists. A recent mission by Dan, Demetrius, and Oksana of Squad 2 involved storming another smuggler ship; on this one, they found the corpses of illegally-smuggled Atalantans fleeing from the invasion of their country across the sea launched by its neighbor Rusalka. Stockham authorizes the raid in a seemingly hasty moment - only Stockham, the nine cultivator cadets conducting the mission, and the man driving them there know of the mission.
Once inside Machigonne offices, the cadets of Squads 1 and 3 are ambushed by the illusionist Harburg, who tortures them by exposing the memories of a chosen victim and forcing the others to live through them. First, Isaac lives through Lynn’s memories - she was a maid for the Cartwright family who was secretly taught to cultivate by Mackenzie, a path Lynn’s family heavily pushes her towards so she can move upwards in society as a cultivator and free them all from their servitude. Lynn has an intense dislike for cultivation and her current position as a marine.
Isaac then lives through Reed’s memories - she became the black sheep of the family for her lack of Rddhi ability and passion for it amid the high expectations for her, since she’s the spitting image of the fallen hero Viola Reed, a fact Hibiscus Reed highly resents. Her only friend is her cousin Karin, a schizophrenic cultivator claiming she can hear God. The Reed family’s former adopted ward-turned-military leader, Secretary Alexander of the Army, hosts a speech advising a national eugenics program to prevent the potential chaos caused by the growing number of cultivators within Arcadian society. Karin has an episode and interrupts his speech; days later, she is hospitalized. Reed discovers Karin’s been lobotomized by the scientist Dr. Oswald at the behest of both Alexander and Reed’s own father, who warns Reed against becoming a similar failure in the eyes of the family. Reed has a vision of the Gardener embracing Karin, who’s been rendered mute and mindless by the operation.
Both Lynn and Reed have breakdowns. Isaac’s turn comes up next, but he notices a brief break in the illusion that allows him to gain control of his movements during his memories. Kieran notices this as well, but not before Harburg exposes Isaac’s inner secrets - his desire to change the country and overthrow the government and his personal thoughts on the cultivators, including that his quick friendship with Babs was just a way to get over Kassandra. Kieran rallies a despondent Isaac, who escapes from the illusion and cripples Harburg. As the group recovers, Sam appears and mortally wounds Kieran before escaping back to the second floor. Kieran thanks them all for helping him change and then dies from his wounds.
The squads wanted to capture Harburg alive to get more information out of him, but Lynn uses the distraction of Kieran’s death to execute the illusionist in an apparent moment of vengeance. The squads rally and storm the second floor, which has been set on fire by Restorationist forces. Some of the office workers are innocent and are rushed to safety; some of them are Restorationists and ambush the squads, forcing Isaac to kill one and Babs apparently several. Babs tells Isaac to never mistake her for anyone else ever again - because they’re friends who both want to change this country, after all. She forgives him, and ends up killing one of the few Restorationist cultivators remaining in the building. That means, to get any further information, they must capture Sam alive.
Mackenzie corners Sam and tries to kill him to avenge her brother; when Isaac stops her, she questions why he can seek his own vengeance against the government but not hers against Sam. Isaac says he doesn’t seek vengeance anymore; instead, he seeks justice, and sparing Sam for information will do more for Mackenzie’s vengeance in the long run. She’s unconvinced, and tries to kill Sam, as does Babs. Oksana’s pet snake, also named Oksana, manages to land the last blow, enabling Isaac to capture Sam alive.