On a stormy night, in an old alley in Lingang, a rusted bronze whistle sets off a civilizational shadow war spanning five hundred years. The Ming-era bronze artifact discovered by veteran detective Chen Shouyi at the scene of a string of murders turns out to be a quantum key that activates an interstellar conspiracy. When modern forensic techniques collide with the mechanical rituals of The Exploitation of the Works of Nature, and swarms of nanites gnaw out a lost star map from the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the “Hongmeng Project,” which began during the Jiajing era, finally sheds its disguise. The interstellar beacons built from clusters of bronze cauldrons are turning Earth into fuel for a higher civilization’s leap through space.
New police detective Lin Xiaoman inherits more than her mentor’s badge. She also bears a spiral birthmark on the back of her neck that seems to breathe. When the Zhenhai Iron Bull opens its quantum eye beneath the Qiantang River, and the Liangzhu jade cong plays a countermeasure frequency in the rainstorm, she must carry humanity’s last genetic seeds between the light-years of judgment in the Interstellar Court and the folds of time around the Bronze Star Gate, and unravel the ultimate question rusted into the genes of civilization: Are we the inheritors of the universe, or experimental subjects planted here?
In this game of survival encoded with the Classic of Changes of Lianshan, every tremor of a bronze whistle reshapes the fabric of time, and every drop of nanite blood bears the last words of forty-six extinct civilizations. When the cables of the space elevator begin turning to bronze, and the pupils of newborns reveal the Twenty-Eight Mansions, you will hear the wail of an entire galaxy in the rust of bronze.
