Cheng Xin awakens after more than sixty-two years in Asia Hibernation Center #1 and immediately senses that society has changed. The facility is plain, metallic, understaffed, and low on holographic information systems compared with the Broadcast Era. The practical clothing, hurried workers, and reappearance of visibly masculine men make Cheng Xin feel that humanity has swung back toward a harder, labor-centered social order.

The next morning, Cao Bin arrives and says Thomas Wade sent him to fetch Cheng Xin, implying that the condition for her awakening has been met. Before explaining the curvature propulsion project, Cao Bin decides to show Cheng Xin the new world so that she can make an informed decision. From a balcony, Cheng Xin first mistakes the city for an ordinary ground settlement, then realizes it is Space City Asia I: a vast spinning cylinder inside Jupiter’s shadow.

Cao Bin guides Cheng Xin through Asia I by bus, and Cheng Xin is moved by its crowded, ordinary human life: commuters, laborers, couples, markets, schools, complaints, advertisements, and daily worries. At the city’s axial gateway, Cheng Xin sees the full inner cylinder, its artificial suns, and the lights of the city; the sight finally gives Cheng Xin a sense of home she has lacked since leaving the Common Era. On the exterior spaceport, Cao Bin shows Cheng Xin the Jovian Bunker World, where twenty-six cities hide behind Jupiter, with more city clusters behind Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Cheng Xin witnesses the dangers and engineering demands of this world when Europa passes extremely close to Asia I, disturbing gravity, atmosphere, and the city’s structure. Cao Bin explains that the Jovian moons, especially Europa, are both resources and hazards; after a dark forest strike, their altered orbits will make survival more complex. Cheng Xin and Cao Bin then travel by dinghy to other cities, with Jupiter looming as an immense dark wall behind them.

Over the next three days, Cao Bin shows Cheng Xin multiple space cities and their social contrasts. North America I is a large spherical commercial center with variable gravity and a ring-ocean; Europe IV is a wealthy football-shaped city with district suns and luxurious homes; Pacific I is an abandoned, weightless, poor, self-organized city of the homeless, unemployed, artists, extremists, and gangs. Pacific I reveals that the Bunker World has revived poverty and disorder, though the Federation still supplies basic welfare.

Cao Bin also explains the broader structure of human civilization: space-city designs prioritize “world-sense,” newer outer-planet cities can dock into larger combined worlds, and the Solar System Federation now consists of city-states. About nine hundred million people live in the Bunker World, while Earth has only about five million residents and is now politically just one city among many. Cheng Xin sees the tiny lights of the cities before vast Jupiter as fragile but precious shelters for nearly all humanity.