After quantum physicist Gu Yunshen witnesses his fiancée die in a laboratory accident, he becomes a “scientific prisoner” controlled by the military. His fate changes when he discovers a bronze stele beneath an Antarctic glacier, inscribed with quantum equations and trigrams from the I Ching. Lin Xueqing, an intelligence agent with the Ministry of State Security, bears a mysterious “compass bloodline” that lets her foresee the dark-matter dangers left behind by the Xingxu civilization. Meanwhile, Lu Ziyu, a shady amateur archaeologist whose feng shui skills are only half-baked, turns out to hold the key to solving the riddles of an advanced civilization.
Forced to team up, the three confront a truth that overturns everything they know: Earth is an interstellar zoo belonging to the advanced civilization known as the “Observers,” and humanity is no more than a colony of ants in a laboratory dish. When the “dark matter crystal cluster” beneath the Antarctic ice awakens, the world is plunged into a desperate struggle against rifts in space-time and invading alien creatures. Yet the collision of scientific logic and esoteric arts reveals a glimmer of hope: Gu Yunshen’s entropy vision can rewrite the decay of matter, Lin Xueqing’s compass can summon projections from parallel universes, and the jade pendant passed down through Lu Ziyu’s family is actually a genetic key to the Xingxu civilization...
But more terrifying than the alien creatures is human greed. The military weaponizes Xingxu technology, while esoteric clans carve up the land in the name of the “Way of Heaven.” The Observers’ mechanical eyes already loom beyond the solar system. To break free from the shackles of civilization, Gu Yunshen bears the code of a black hole in his own body, Lin Xueqing sacrifices her power of foresight to reverse the timeline, and at the ultimate crossroads, Lu Ziyu smiles and recites his final poem: “Fear not the road ahead, nor where it ends; the burning river of stars is my home.”
This escape across a multidimensional universe will ultimately prove that science measures the world, esoteric arts question the human heart, and the brilliance of humanity is a bug that even advanced civilizations can never replicate.
