In Crisis Era Year 4, Yun Tianming remains hospitalized with advanced cancer. After a checkup, Dr. Zhang leaves him a newspaper, and Tianming notices that public attention has already begun drifting away from Trisolaris and the ETO toward ordinary life. A front-page story about China passing a euthanasia law catches Tianming’s attention, and he wonders why Dr. Zhang wanted him to see it.

That night, fellow patient Lao Li tells Tianming that he intends to use the new law. Lao Li explains that his loving children would otherwise bankrupt themselves for treatments that cannot cure him, so he wants to protect them and their families. Tianming later dreams of drifting on a small origami boat across a gray, drizzling, shoreless expanse.

Dr. Zhang asks Tianming to attend Lao Li’s euthanasia ceremony as a representative of other patients. Tianming watches through a one-way mirror as Lao Li signs legal documents, receives instructions, and uses a mouse for the first time to confirm five times that he wants to terminate his life. When Lao Li makes the final selection, Tianming is overwhelmed by grief and rage, but the injection proceeds, and Lao Li dies quietly.

Afterward, Dr. Zhang explains the drugs used and says there was no pain. Tianming realizes that Dr. Zhang knows his sister from high school and concludes that Zhang has been subtly guiding him toward euthanasia on his sister’s behalf. Tianming understands his sister’s likely reasoning: his treatment is draining their father’s savings, which she sees as money that should help her own struggling family. Feeling unwanted and identifying with Kafka’s lonely son in “The Judgment,” Tianming decides that if his family wants him to die, he will die.

Back in his room, Tianming receives an unexpected visit from Hu Wen, an old college classmate. Wen reminds him of a college outing at Miyun Reservoir, where Tianming first spoke with Cheng Xin and fell in love with drizzly days, wet pebbles, and origami boats. Wen then reveals that Tianming’s joking idea for a weed-based organic drink inspired his successful beverage company, Green Tempest, and gives Tianming three million yuan as repayment.

Tianming briefly seeks medical confirmation that money cannot save him, and a senior oncologist tells him that his cancer has spread too far for a cure. With hope extinguished, Tianming applies for euthanasia. He refuses to leave the money to his sister and searches for a final meaningful use for it; after seeing a report on the UN’s Stars Our Destination Project, he looks at the night sky and decides to buy Cheng Xin a star.