One summer night, nineteen-year-old Gu Qichi fell asleep on a haystack, gazing at the stars.
His memory was so good that he could recite the order in which every star rose. His imagination was so poor that he couldn’t picture what lay beyond the universe. He thought it was just an ordinary dream, until the satellite beneath his feet, as big as a car, shattered into pieces. He fell into a black hole and landed in a place called the Qinglan Domain.
A man named Qi Weisheng told him: Subjectively, you were gone for seventeen days, but only one second passed outside. Black holes can transport you by means of gravitational wave fields. You can spend a whole day inside while people outside blink once. Don’t count the seconds.
Gu Qichi became a “Blank Visitor.” Earth had no crossing point, no phase records, and no reference standard for the Qinglan Domain. In the eyes of the universe, he was a blank sheet of paper. Shuang Jianxian, a field theorist from the Qinglan Domain, added him to an observation team and gave him a recording slate, sending him on a journey to observe and record what he saw.
He went to Mirror Tide Harbor, where he saw bridges of liquid membrane span the void through the tension of biological films. He went to Mossbone Star, where the Wei'ang people tapped the ground to communicate and the whole planet resonated. He went to the Refracting Court, where the Optical Delay Line Court of Justice used light to adjudicate causality. He went to the Inverted Sand Sea, where the Time-Sand people built levees of temporal sand: decades passed inside them, while only seconds passed outside. He met Xianwai, the faceless lamplighter; Misha, a three-legged creature with a crystal shell; Luojietan, shaped like a folded hourglass; and Helian Jin, whose hands were covered in burn-like markings. Every domain had its own technology, and every friend had their own way of life.
Then he discovered that whoever he recorded was erased. His observation log was a list of names.
The Zeroing Tide spread in reverse from the Sequence Domain, where there were no black holes, erasing civilizations from “recorded” to “unrecorded.” His friends
