In the sophon-free room, the IDC members finish reading Yun Tianming’s three fairy tales. AA jokes that Princess Dewdrop resembles Cheng Xin, but Cheng Xin urges attention to the urgent task and privately wonders whether Tianming meant the princess to reflect her. The chair asks for opinions on how the committee’s working groups should proceed.

A children’s story writer from the literary analysis group warns that the message may be impossible to decipher. He argues that strategic intelligence requires concrete meaning, while literature thrives on ambiguity; because Tianming would have hidden any real information deeply enough to evade Trisolaran detection, the stories may produce too many plausible interpretations to guide action. He nevertheless praises the tales as excellent fairy tales.

The next day, the IDC begins systematic analysis and quickly encounters exactly that problem. The image of people being painted into pictures is read by some as a metaphor for digitizing humanity, while others see it as a clue about dimensional refuges or four-dimensional space. The glutton fish inspire similarly conflicting theories: one group treats them as dark forest civilizations pacified by a cosmic safety principle, while another proposes self-replicating machines forming a protective barrier around the Solar System.

The machine-barrier theory, called the Shoaling Interpretation, initially attracts serious scientific attention because it offers a technical framework. Further study shows that such a barrier would require tens of thousands of years to form and would have impractical protective or signaling capacity, so the idea is abandoned. Other symbols, including the umbrella, paper, obsidian slab, and soap, generate more competing interpretations without certainty.

The IDC does identify one detail as likely concrete intelligence: the repeated place name He’ershingenmosiken. Unlike the other meaningful Chinese names in the stories, it sounds like a foreign phonetic transcription, appears repeatedly, and is attached to many important objects and people. Scholars search languages, databases, and expert fields for its origin, but find nothing; Cheng Xin firmly confirms that she memorized the pronunciation correctly.

As the work stalls, experts question whether Tianming truly possessed advanced knowledge, and political forces begin twisting interpretations to serve their own agendas. The IDC’s failure lowers morale but also ends hopes for an easy miracle. Under public pressure, Fleet International and the UN shift focus toward known technologies, especially modeling the destruction of Trisolaris to understand a possible solar dark forest strike, leading the Bunker Project to replace Tianming’s message as the central survival effort.