Anomalous objects in a subterranean warehouse in the northwest tremble in unison. A warning letter from 2049 burns to ash, while fragments marked "destroyed" reappear due to a typo. The secret unit codenamed "749" has long been locked in a struggle with the unknown at the limits of human understanding.
This science-fiction mystery links 100 standalone cases. A recovery officer confronts an alien mother-fragment in a lead-lined chamber; an analyst deciphers warning symbols left by a non-carbon-based consciousness; and a controller seeks the truth about the "Contact Division" amid the fog of memory. Alien wreckage hides powers that overturn all understanding: ink from an employee handbook creates mass hallucinations, while the pages of a report rewrite reality. It can sustain the body while devouring the mind, deliver warnings from the future while triggering time paradoxes, and even issue an alert from the deep sea: "The marauder civilization will arrive in 2079."
The stories never shy away from tests of human nature: a former director becomes a vessel for fragments in his pursuit of immortality; a clerical worker pays the price of being forgotten to save her mother; and a renegade researcher uses a child's prophecy to awaken the public. Meanwhile, the mystery of the mother-fragment runs as a hidden thread through the first recovery in 1949, the forbidden contact in 1972, its containment in the deep sea in 2023, and the "Kindling Project," revealing how 749's mission changed from "anomaly control" to "preparations for an interstellar war."
Intern Lin Xiao grips the metal fragment engraved with the words "What are we fighting for?" Outside the window, the sign for the "National Center for Emergency Response to Special Phenomena" weighs heavily upon him. The novel's most shocking secret is not alien technology, but the silent guardianship of a generation: weighing truth against peace, holding fast to humanity and duty, and keeping the flame of Earth's survival alive beneath the shadow of the cosmos.
Author's real experience