Starry Sky Beneath the Spring

A sci-fi mystery rooted in the legends of Jinan. “Snakes never emerge, and frogs never croak” at Daming Lake. Is it an age-old mystery, or a warning of a crisis across multiple dimensions? Biology PhD Chen Mian uncovers the truth: the croaking sacs of the lake’s frogs have been parasitized by an ancient fungus, turning them into “living hard drives” that carry encoded messages. Zhu Daming, an investigator from Bureau 749, and his guide Chen Xiaohu venture deep beneath the lake. There, they discover a thousand-year-old seal laid down with five springs by Zeng Gong of the Northern Song dynasty, containing an unidentified metallic object. Zhu Daming dies in the line of duty. His successor, Yang Xiaohao, and paleographer Sheng Juzheng decipher the secret writing on a tortoise shell, attributed to Zou Yan, a pre-Qin fangshi, from the frogs’ calls: “Heaven and earth have order; the Great Way has code.” The truth behind the guest star that fell into the lake comes to light: a dormant alien beacon, asleep for four billion years, uses a field of total silence to cloak itself, hiding Earth from the universe. The silence of snakes and frogs, and the failure of instruments, are all byproducts of this field. Daniel, head of the multinational energy conglomerate Langerdan, touched the beacon years ago. His consciousness was corrupted and mutated by interstellar data. Now he violently dismantles the millennia-old array that keeps it in check, hoping to activate the Star Gate. If it opens, the ecosystem will collapse in an instant, and Earth’s coordinates will be exposed to forces beyond this world. Yang Xiaohao, Chen Xiaohu, and cosmologist Qin Guanlan follow the spring channels into the beacon’s core, vowing to preserve its silence for eons. As the Star Gate opens, the histories of ten galactic civilizations that perished emerge from the depths of the spring veins. Each vanished race glimpsed the ultimate truth before it was ready, only to be devoured by it. Humanity must not only stop Daniel from tearing through the final barrier, but also face the same choice as the ten precursor civilizations. A war for the survival of civilization is quietly erupting beneath the stars under Daming Lake, and Jinan is nearing the singularity of civilization’s rebirth.