The story takes place in Linhe County, on the edge of the North China Plain. Qinghe Middle School sits at its center, with the following locations within a five-kilometer radius:
- North: an industrial zone on the outskirts, with a rust-streaked boiler factory and a concrete batching plant that runs day and night, symbols of the brutal expansion of modernization.
- South: Cricket Village, with mud-brick walls, gray-tiled roofs, and a millstone beneath the pagoda trees, preserving the close-knit warmth of a traditional clan community.
- West: a scrap-metal workshop, where Su’s father lives in seclusion. Satellite wreckage, machine-tool parts, and potted hibiscus crowd the place, making it a hidden crossroads between folk science and alien technology.
- Qinghe Middle School: A vessel for folded identities
The main building is a four-story red-brick structure. Its corridors bear the slogan “Knowledge Changes Your Destiny,” while students have drawn anime characters on the walls with correction fluid. The lock on the abandoned rooftop observatory is rusted, and inside its dome are records of a 2003 bolide sighting, with anomalous spectral data marked in Russian.
- The teachers’ office and dormitory: Su Li’s desk holds a cherry-blossom handkerchief sent by her mother and a space-themed calendar from her father. Deep in a drawer lies an encrypted USB drive containing an acoustic resonance model of fragments of star trails.
- Cricket Village: A cocoon of time woven from hibiscus
Hibiscus vines cover the outer walls of Chen Mo’s mud-brick home. In the backyard stands the woodcarving bench his father left behind, with an unfinished carving patterned with star trails buried beneath the shavings. In a corner of the courtyard, his mother grows water lilies in an old bathtub. During the rainy season, moonlight reflected on the water makes a hanging ornament grow faintly warm.
