The Intelligence Decipherment Committee holds its first meeting in a sophon-free room, even though most people believe the sophons have left the Solar System. The precaution is meant chiefly to protect Yun Tianming, whose survival inside Trisolaran society makes him humanity’s only embedded source of alien intelligence.

The UN and Fleet International keep the three fairy tales absolutely secret, despite the difficulty of secrecy in a transparent society, because public decoding efforts might expose Tianming. The meeting itself reflects the growing authority of international institutions and their movement toward world-government-like coordination.

Cheng Xin attends with other committee members, including former Swordholder candidates Bi Yunfeng and Cao Bin, while AA is present only as Cheng Xin’s assistant. The chair praises Tianming as humanity’s bravest warrior and credits Cheng Xin with successfully retrieving his intelligence, but Cheng Xin asks the committee to also honor Thomas Wade for making the Staircase Project possible. The room falls silent because Wade is remembered as a dark, frightening figure, and the chair ignores the proposal.

The chair explains the IDC’s working assumption: Tianming’s message probably does not contain direct technical instructions but may point humanity toward the correct research directions for survival technologies such as lightspeed flight or cosmic safety notices. He says the actual intelligence is believed to lie in the three stories, not in the open conversation.

The committee analyzes Tianming’s deception. Tianming created many fairy tales and planted three meaningful ones among them, then circulated them long enough among the Trisolarans to make them seem harmless. By falsely claiming Cheng Xin had told them to him in childhood, he further disguised their importance while also signaling to humanity that these three tales mattered. AA angrily objects that the lie endangered Cheng Xin, but a PIA officer argues the risk was calculated and probably checked against available records.

The chair notes that Trisolarans even extended the meeting by six minutes after Sophon’s deadline so Tianming could finish, proving they did not recognize the danger. Tianming’s final invitation to meet somewhere in the Milky Way suggests he cannot return to the Solar System and, more grimly, that he doubts Earth will survive. The committee then distributes paper copies of the secret tales, to be read only inside the room, and begins the work of deciphering them.