In Year 3 of the Crisis Era, humanity begins reshaping itself for a long war. Naval officers Wu Yue and Zhang Beihai are abruptly recalled from work on the unfinished carrier Tang and told they are being transferred into the newly formed Chinese Space Force, confirming that traditional naval programs are being subordinated to future space war. In the United States, an adapted missile-defense system mistakenly destroys space debris and is publicly framed as a successful anti-sophon test, showing how planetary defense is being improvised and politically managed. At the same time, public fear spreads through ordinary life: retired worker Zhang Yuanchao feels the crisis closing in, hears official denials of sophon panic, and watches wartime controls and economic strain begin to affect daily society.

Elsewhere, the Trisolarans reestablish covert contact with a despondent ETO member later known as the Second Wallbreaker. By proving their presence, they revive his devotion and assign him Mike Evans’s unrevealed order, which becomes newly urgent because of the coming Wallfacer Project. The Trisolarans also conclude that human mental opacity makes both the Wallfacers and any future human escape into space dangerous, so they order ETO to obstruct escape plans. Their hidden virtual world comes back online, surviving Adventists reconnect, and the organization begins rebuilding under renewed alien direction.

On the human side, the chapter shows how the crisis transforms politics and society. Zhang Yuanchao, Yang Jinwen, and Miao Fuquan argue over wartime controls, class, and the morality of “Escapism,” the idea that some humans should flee into space. Zhang Yuanchao is then persuaded by Shi Xiaoming to invest heavily in a supposed escape fund, only for the UN to pass Resolution 117 declaring Escapism illegal because deciding who escapes would destroy human equality and social order. Zhang realizes he has been swindled out of 400,000 yuan, but his despair is interrupted by the birth of his grandson, which re-centers the chapter on the future generations now trapped inside the Crisis Era. Meanwhile, Zhang Beihai visits his dying father, receives the oblique advice to “think long and hard,” and later weaponizes that clarity in the Space Force by denouncing defeatism, even sacrificing Wu Yue’s position to force the issue into the open.

Luo Ji spends the beginning of the chapter in apparent frivolity, drifting out of another affair while cynically discussing cosmic sociology, Escapism, and humanity’s inability to choose who may survive. As they part, a traffic accident kills the woman beside him and spares Luo Ji only because he falls backward first. Immediately afterward, Luo Ji is seized by Shi Qiang and moved under extraordinary armed protection through underground facilities, convoy transfers, and a heavily escorted intercontinental flight, without being told why. During the journey, Shi Qiang gradually realizes the situation is far bigger than an ordinary case, tries to coach Luo Ji about deception and survival, and becomes his only human point of stability.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Say announces the Wallfacer Project: because sophons can observe all external communication but cannot read thoughts, selected individuals will be allowed to devise secret strategies entirely within their own minds and command vast resources without explanation. Three expected Wallfacers are named—Frederick Tyler, Manuel Rey Diaz, and Bill Hines—and then, to Luo Ji’s shock, he is named the fourth. Luo Ji immediately rejects the role, but learns that refusal changes nothing in practice: outside the UN he is shot by an ETO assassin, survives because of body armor, and discovers that the world still treats him as a Wallfacer. When his attacker mocks Luo Ji’s claim that he has been released, Luo Ji realizes dimly that his refusal has not freed him from the mission; by chapter’s end, Kent remains his liaison, Shi Qiang still commands his protection, and Luo Ji demands answers he is not yet given.