Stardust Journey

The year is 2036 AD. The solar system is quietly passing through a cosmic node reserved by an ancient civilization - waiting for the moment when the infant civilization grows enough to be seen. Humanity does not know this. This is the golden age that mankind thinks is its own - reusable rockets have taken off and landed like airliners, people have set foot on the moon again and are planning Mars, observatories have captured chemical signals suspected of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets dozens of light-years away, quantum communications have been broken, and controllable nuclear fusion has been connected to the grid for the first time. Every piece of news says: We are standing at the doorstep of a civilizational leap. The most secret files of various governments are nothing more than a few pieces of unexplained fallen debris, classified as enemy black technology. No human being knows the truth: this planet has long been targeted by more ancient beings, and is used as a high-quality genetic sample bank, quietly lying on the harvest list. Xin Zhiyuan, 28 years old, neural interface engineer in Hangzhou. Carrying a thirty-year mortgage, raising an orange cat, and listening to the white noise of a second-hand radio telescope late at night. He had been hearing what was in the noise for many years - on the other side of the door, a being who had been waiting for hundreds of thousands of years finally heard the echo. During a three-minute interface test, he was dragged into a breathtaking information moment. Reality only lasted three minutes, but he remembered something that didn't belong to him. Immediately afterwards: his girlfriend fell ill, there were changes in the company, and the mysterious department came to visit... The orange cat disappeared. He soon discovered that he was not chosen because of his talent - it was the geography of the universe that pushed a door in front of him that had not been opened for hundreds of thousands of years. He was listening, and almost no one else was listening.