Geology graduate student Lin Shen encountered a quantum mutation in a stalactite while exploring a Yunnan-Guizhou cave, and fell into a bronze secret realm where time and space folded. Here lurk the strange beasts recorded in the "Book of Mountains and Seas" - Bifang who spits out lava, barbarians who weave plagues, bird swallows of starlight, and an ancient woman "Sui" with a heart of bronze gears resonates with his bloodline.
The two escaped in a labyrinth of fluorescent fungi and mechanical stalactites, gradually uncovering the horrifying truth about the Jiuding system: the alien protocol hidden in the Cambrian fossils, the quantum formula inscribed in the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the civilization experiment that spanned forty years behind his father's mining accident... When the cave tribe's living sacrifice stone knife stabbed Sui, Lin Shen finally awakened - he was not an explorer, but the "Seventh Cauldron" selected by the ancient star map, a living container that carries the dual keys of human existence and destruction.
Lin Shen, who had only returned to reality for ten minutes, spent the rest of his life staring at the bronze star mark on his wrist. At the moment when his heart stopped at the end of his life, he saw Sui walking out of the shadow of the ward. In the shadow of the Nine Cauldrons spinning behind him, billions of civilizations were extinguishing and reborn in the universe like spores.
