After leaving the Three Body game, Wang Miao is drenched in sweat and mentally trapped by the idea of the Chaotic Era. While driving to Yang Dong’s mother’s home, Wang tries to dismiss the game as fiction, but instead analyzes why it feels so real. Wang concludes that the game hides enormous information beneath a compressed surface and begins to suspect that the meaning of the “flying stars” is the key to understanding it.

At the apartment building, Wang meets Ye Wenjie, a thin, aging woman carrying groceries. In her home, Wang finds not a solemn, empty space but Ye calmly caring for several neighbors’ children, speaking to them with warmth and routine affection. Ye quickly understands that Wang has really come because of Yang Dong, and, without forcing him to explain himself, quietly directs him to Yang Dong’s room.

Inside, Wang finds a simple, forest-like room made of bark, stumps, and rough natural materials rather than luxury. On the desk he sees a photograph of Ye and young Yang Dong standing before a vast antenna structure, and a birch-bark notebook containing Yang Dong’s childhood drawings. The drawings, made when Yang Dong was only three, are not normal childlike figures but tangled, desperate lines, suggesting a mind trying to express something far beyond her age.

Ye joins Wang and speaks openly about her daughter. Ye says that she exposed Yang Dong too early to abstract and extreme ideas, and that Yang Dong had an unusual sensitivity to beauty in mathematics and music. According to Ye, Yang Dong’s inner world was built almost entirely on pure theory; when that theoretical world collapsed, Yang Dong had nothing solid left to support her, which Ye believes contributed to her suicide. Wang argues that current events are shaking many scientists’ understanding of reality, but Ye still sees her daughter’s fragility through the lens of womanhood and says that a woman should be like water, able to adapt and survive.

As Wang prepares to leave, he raises his other reason for visiting: he wants to observe the cosmic microwave background. Ye explains the available observatories and arranges access for him through her former student Sha Ruishan, who works the night shift at a Beijing facility. Before Wang goes, Ye notices how unwell he looks and gives him ginseng from an old friend from the base. Her quiet kindness deeply moves Wang and briefly eases the strain he has been carrying.