A year before Cheng Xin awakens, the advance warning system detects an immense intelligent spaceship passing near the Solar System at nearly lightspeed. The Federation Government keeps the discovery secret after earlier false alarms, but the observers panic as the ship passes. The ship does not fire a photoid at the Sun; instead, it launches an electromagnetically invisible projectile that emits weak gravitational waves, misses the Sun, and then decelerates enough for human ships to intercept it.

Revelation and Alaska leave the Neptune city cluster to investigate. General Alexei Vasilenko commands Revelation’s team, and physicist Bai Ice leads the technical work. As they travel through the old Doomsday Battle region, they find debris from the destroyed stellar-class fleet, which reminds Bai Ice and Vasilenko that humanity is again approaching an unknown and possibly superior force.

The expedition locates the projectile but cannot see it until Revelation comes very close. It appears as a tiny white, paper-like membrane that emits its own light, has no measurable thickness or mass, and cannot be touched, pushed, collected, or affected by electromagnetic radiation or magnetic fields. Revelation maneuvers around the object so it can sit in the laboratory, but after twenty hours of study, the team still understands almost nothing beyond the fact that its light and gravitational waves are fading.

Exhausted and uneasy, Bai Ice remembers a final conversation with Ding Yi before Ding Yi investigated the Trisolaran droplet. In that memory and nightmare, Ding Yi warns that even the laws of physics may not be safe from cosmic manipulation, and Bai Ice awakens terrified. Bai Ice urges Vasilenko to move Revelation away from the paper slip, arguing from intuition and from the lesson of the droplet that arrogance is deadly. Vasilenko accepts the warning, moves Revelation two thousand kilometers away, and leaves a pinnace to monitor the object.

When the paper slip’s protective emissions vanish, the monitoring pinnace and its two crew members are suddenly flattened into a glowing plane. Bai Ice realizes that the object is not matter but two-dimensional space whose protective field has evaporated; three-dimensional space is collapsing into it. Revelation tries to flee at Full Ahead, but surrounding space is flowing into the two-dimensional region, and Bai Ice calculates that escape velocity is lightspeed. The crew accepts that no one in the Solar System can escape.

Before Revelation falls into the expanding plane, Bai Ice and the others understand the missed warning hidden in Yun Tianming’s fairy tales: the Solar System would not be destroyed by a photoid but by dimensional collapse, making the Bunker Project useless. Revelation is flattened into a vast two-dimensional image visible from Alaska, and its crew become the first human victims painted into the Solar System’s coming annihilation.