Zhaozhao, Beyond Understanding

Tsinghua University, 1937. The night a bronze taotie devoured the physics lab, Shen Zhaozhao of the chemistry department swung a stick of nitroglycerin at her family’s alchemy furnace. Instead, she blew open a path for Lu Chen, a man from the future in a three-piece suit, and the hourglass in his pocket that had looped through time 87 times. When the bronze oracle-bone text of codebreaker Jiang Lin began writing alien code on its own, Zhaozhao finally understood her father’s last words: a mathematical beast capable of devouring civilizations was hidden within the cloud-and-thunder patterns. Now, the astrophysics professor she’d secretly loved for seven years is at her left, while at her right stands a sworn enemy who fell from the sky after crawling out of a bronze cauldron. And the bronze beast AI says it plans to reboot Earth using the Zhoubi Suanjing. Tonight, on the rooftop of Tsinghua’s library, three science whizzes decide to mix drinks using Maxwell’s equations, wager their lives on the Riemann hypothesis, and hide a never-fading rose inside a Klein bottle. Who says romance in the Republic of China was all moonlight and flowers?