After a mysterious and brutal childhood tragedy, brothers Arthur and Jack Stanley are left affected in different ways, with each choosing contrasting paths in life. Arthur, the dreamy and detached visionary, gets progressively more involved in his late father's jiujitsu academy, The Tree of Life. It isn't long before Arthur discovers that what he first thought was just a bog-standard academy for martial arts turns out to be something with a secret underground layer and a special purpose. Intellectually sharp and hyper-rational Jack, meanwhile, goes down an adversarial path as he chooses to side with the dark character Harry Sickle; together, they go on to develop technologies that affect the very fundamentals of human nature and lead to the birth of a new dystopian order.