The East China Sea, three days after a typhoon passed. Lu You retrieves a metal fragment from the seabed. The symbol on it, a cross surrounded by a ring, is identical to the one in his father Lu Yuan's notebook before he disappeared.
His father, Lu Yuan, vanished fifteen years ago near the Antarctic ice wall. On the tenth page of the notebook, the Chinese text abruptly ends: "If you're reading this, it means I, " The sentence breaks off there, the final stroke of the last character trailing far across the page, as if a hand had suddenly been dragged away from the paper.
Liu Linger, a scholar of ancient scripts, comes looking for him. Her grandfather, Lin Yuanshan, spent thirty years studying the same system of symbols, and was dismissed as a madman by the academic world for all thirty of them. Before he died, he said one thing: "Those symbols are real. The Antarctic ice wall is real. Find the man named Lu Yuan."
Huronk. Latitude 79 degrees, 58 minutes south, longitude 112 degrees, 3 minutes east.
Through the portal lies the place where all the answers begin. Beyond it are the sun that never sets in the far north, the iridescent northern sea where Kun swims, the war giants have waged for countless years across the Echo Plains, the final dirge of the deep singers as Lemuria sank beneath the sea, and the ring his father had held in his palm, waiting for fifteen years.
The wall isn't meant to keep those outside from getting in. It's meant to keep what's inside from getting out.
The watch is the passage, and the passage is the way home.
