Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining’s deaths are accepted as accidents, so Ye Wenjie remains unsuspected at Red Coast Base. As security restrictions ease, local children begin coming to the gatehouse with physics questions after the restoration of the National College Entrance Exam. Their eagerness surprises Ye, and she starts tutoring them regularly, eventually teaching groups of children and even a local teacher. On a lonely New Year’s Eve, those children visit her with hot dumplings, and their kindness offers Ye a rare moment of warmth.

Eight months after sending her message toward the sun, Ye goes into labor. The birth is dangerously difficult; she loses a massive amount of blood, falls into a coma, and hallucinates three blazing suns as punishment for her betrayal of humanity. She survives only because peasants from Qijiatun donate blood. Since Ye is too weak to care for the baby alone, Hunter Qi and his family take Ye and her newborn daughter, Yang Dong, into their home with the base’s permission.

In Qijiatun, Ye spends more than half a year recovering among villagers who treat her and Yang Dong with generosity. Because Ye cannot nurse, village women breastfeed Yang Dong, especially Hunter Qi’s daughter-in-law Feng. Ye joins the women in their daily conversations and quiet domestic routines, and the village’s rich, concrete life slowly softens her. One night, when Feng casually asks why the stars do not fall, Ye answers simply instead of scientifically, then imagines a small, comforting universe shaped by Feng’s understanding. In the mountains, something long frozen in Ye’s heart begins to thaw.

Ye eventually returns to Red Coast Base with Yang Dong. Two years later, Ye and her father are politically rehabilitated, Tsinghua invites her back to teach, and she receives her father’s back pay. Although Ye feels no excitement and would prefer to remain at the remote base, she leaves for Yang Dong’s education and returns to Tsinghua as China enters a period of scientific and social recovery. Ye receives no further message from Trisolaris, and distance from Red Coast makes her alien contact feel dreamlike. She buries the memory of her transmission, the warning she ignored, and the murders she committed by losing herself in work.

After returning to Tsinghua, Ye takes Yang Dong to visit her mother, Shao Lin, who has rebuilt her life and status through political calculation. The meeting remains polite but emotionally empty, and Shao Lin’s new husband bluntly warns Ye not to pursue responsibility for her father’s death. Ye leaves and never comes back. She then finds three of the former Red Guards who helped kill Ye Zhetai and summons them to the exercise grounds, hoping to hear repentance. Instead, the women recount their own ruin, suffering, and historical abandonment, and refuse moral responsibility. Their lack of remorse destroys Ye’s renewed faith in humanity, removes her lingering doubt about betraying humankind, and leaves her fully committed to bringing a superior extraterrestrial civilization to Earth.