Visitor from the Frozen Wasteland

Han Xiaoyu, a space-time researcher in 2149, is hurled into a temporal maelstrom by an experimental accident and crashes onto a barren slope in a remote permafrost village in Henan in 2003. In the bitter wind, his nanothermal suit, designed to protect him from extreme cold, makes him look like a “monster” to the villagers in coarse cotton jackets. To avoid drawing attention, he has no choice but to claim he is a member of a geological survey team. Li Xiuqin, an elderly woman who lives alone, takes in this young man of “unknown origins.” The hot soup in her earthen house and the clothes mended by hands covered in chilblains gradually melt away Han Xiaoyu’s wariness of this unfamiliar era. But the temporal locator he carries keeps making strange noises in the dead of night. What frightens him even more is that the anomalous energy it detects beneath the permafrost exactly matches the signs that preceded the cataclysmic collapse of spacetime in the future. Wang Liangzhu, a young leader in the village, has had his eye on Han Xiaoyu from the start. The man’s “survey equipment” never comes with a manual, and he watches the well more intently than he watches his own land. When hot water suddenly wells up from the frozen well and strange ice crystals spread across the cellar walls, Wang Liangzhu’s suspicions finally boil over. Han Xiaoyu is forced to drop his disguise as a “geologist” and reveal that he comes from the future. Following the legend in Li Xiuqin’s family notes of “a visitor from beyond the heavens falling into the permafrost,” Han Xiaoyu, Li Xiuqin, and Wang Liangzhu find a glowing ice stone in the forbidden area behind the village. This natural temporal crystal resonates with the locator and projects a startling image: the spacetime storm about to engulf the village in 2003 is the very source of the future collapse of spacetime. And Li Xiuqin, whose face is lined with wrinkles, is actually his