As usual, Ding Yi holds everyone beneath his notice. He doesn’t greet anyone and he doesn’t sit in the large, comfortable chair prepared for him. Instead, he strolls aimlessly until he reaches a corner of the auditorium, where there’s a large glass cabinet. He admires the large clay plate, one of the observatory head’s local treasures, propped up inside. It’s a priceless relic of the Western Zhou era. Carved onto its surface is a star atlas as seen by the naked eye on a summer night several thousand years ago. Having suffered the ravages of time, the star atlas is now faint and blurred. The starry sky outside the hall, though, is still bright and clear.

Ding Yi digs out a pipe and tobacco from his jacket pocket. Self-assured, he lights the pipe, then takes a puff. This surprises everyone, because he has severe tracheitis. He’s never smoked before and no one has ever dared to smoke around him. Furthermore, smoking is strictly prohibited in the auditorium, and that pipe produces more smoke than ten cigarettes.

However, Professor Ding is entitled to do anything he wants. He founded the unified field theory, realizing Albert Einstein’s dream. The series of predictions his theory has made about space over a vast scale have all been confirmed by actual observations. For three years, as many as a hundred supercomputers ran a mathematical model of the unified field theory nonstop and obtained a result that was hard to believe: The universe that had been expanding for about fourteen billion years would, in two years, start collapsing. Now, out of those two years, there’s only one hour left.

White smoke lingers around his head. It forms a dreamlike pattern, as if his incredible ideas are floating out of his mind….

Cautiously, the observatory head approaches Ding Yi. “Professor Ding, the governor will be here. Persuading her to accept the invitation wasn’t easy. Please, I beg you, use the influence you have so that she’ll increase our funding. Originally, we weren’t going to bother you with this, but the observatory is out of funds. The national government can’t give us any more money this year. We can only ask the province. We are the main observatory for the country. You can see what we’ve been reduced to. We can’t even afford the electric bill for our radio telescope. We’re already trying now to figure out what to do about this.” The observatory head points to the ancient star atlas plate Ding Yi has been admiring. “If selling antiquities weren’t illegal, we would have sold it long ago.”

At that moment, the governor and her entourage of two enter the auditorium. The exhaustion on their faces drags a thread of the mundane into this otherworldly place.