2045: Dragon Kingdom's Lunar Base, The Moon Falls from the Sky

In 2045, Longguo is preparing to land on the moon and establish a lunar base. In the winter of 2035, at an extreme-cold research station on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, architecture graduate student Lu Chenguang watches three colleagues freeze into ice sculptures in an instant after a helium leak. The blast door, which should theoretically require dual authorization to open, silently slides open before him. The System log shows that the encryption algorithm behind the attack command comes from the same source as the culprit behind his mother’s “traffic accident” five years ago.

His mentor, Shen Wei, reveals a cruel truth: Moon soil sample X-7, studied by his late mother Su Yun, emits an electrical signal in a vacuum every 28.7 seconds, like a heartbeat asleep for 4.13 billion years. And those who hunted her have never gone away. A dagger engraved with an intertwined eagle and chrysanthemum pierces the carotid artery of a fellow trainee. On the back of a satellite photo, his mother’s trembling handwriting reads, “Mom is here. Don’t come.”

Lu Chenguang is drawn into a secret mission codenamed “Cornerstone.” The three people accompanying him are former national security agent Zhao Haifeng, quantum specialist Lin Wei, who is searching for her missing father, and materials prodigy Zhou Rui, framed for stealing technology. Each carries a blood feud tied to the moon. Their true enemy is Atlas, a trans-Pacific technology monopoly. Its tentacles reach into every core aerospace operation, its moles lurk in the shadows, and the reflection in a lens on the watchtower forever follows the backs of everyone’s necks on the training ground.

380,000 kilometers away, in an unnamed depression on the eastern edge of a lunar crater named Qiming, something buried 4.13 billion years ago is waiting for someone with the same heartbeat to come and open a door that has never been opened.