Stars Against Fate

In 2078, in the deserts of northwestern China, a meteorite tore across the sky, shattering the boundaries of human understanding. Beneath a stone carving of a Han Dynasty star map, archaeologist Lin You witnessed the arrival of an alien relic, the Against-the-Tide Star Remnant. This cluster of crystals could reverse time and space, but the instant she touched it, it branded her collarbone with radiation, rewrote reality, and erased the truth of the meteorite's fall. Three months later, she awoke in a hospital. Every trace of the meteorite was gone from the world, leaving only a 137-meter-wide glass crater that stared down at humanity like the eye of a god.

A mysterious one-eyed man arrived with the organization Cocoon of Time and revealed a cruel truth: the Star Remnant was a doomsday spark left by future humans to fight the heat death of the universe, and Lin You was the 88th genetically compatible host. Hidden in her DNA was a space-time cipher left by a Qin Dynasty alchemist. Every time she reversed time and space, part of her body vanished or her memories collapsed. When the murals in Mogao Cave 137 peeled away, fluorescent light revealed a countdown to the destruction of 2078. When a Qin Dynasty woman's corpse in a low-temperature laboratory issued a warning in Lin You's own voice, she discovered that she herself had activated the Star Remnant a thousand years ago, before a bronze armillary sphere.

Various factions maneuvered within the rifts in time and space, while quantum scars left by an interstellar civilization murmured on the far side of the moon. The price of reversing entropy was the annihilation of the very existence of whoever touched it. The markings on Lin You's collarbone were closing in on her heart: they were both a countdown to doomsday and the key to restarting civilization. When another version of herself from a parallel world appeared, carrying a bloodstained blueprint of the Star Remnant, Lin You had to choose: rewrite the chain of causality leading to humanity's end, or let time and space collapse forever in paradox?