In 1930 Manhattan, a recreated elixir of immortality slips loose among the city's criminals, and most of the people who drink it have no idea what they have swallowed. Firo Prochainezo, a young member of the Martillo camorra family, crosses paths with the alchemist Szilard Quates, the Gandor brothers' outfit, and the cheerfully hopeless thieves Isaac Dian and Miria Harvent. With no fixed protagonist, these light novels move year by year through Prohibition-era America and back to the 1711 voyage of the Advenna Avis, where alchemists first bargained for eternal life.