At Red Coast Base, Ye Wenjie throws herself completely into secret work and becomes part of the project’s technical core. Commissar Lei values her research mainly because he can claim credit for it, while Chief Yang continues to trust her ability. Ye is assigned to solve Red Coast’s recurring “solar outage” problem, the interference caused when solar radiation overwhelms signals coming from space, but after months of work she concludes that the fluctuations in the monitored bands cannot be explained by ordinary solar surface activity.

Instead of ending the project, Ye keeps it alive so she can retain access to foreign journals and scientific materials. While reading a brief report on strong radio outbursts from Jupiter, she notices that Red Coast recorded severe interference shortly afterward. By comparing the timing and geometry of Jupiter, the sun, and Earth, Ye realizes the delay matches a path in which Jupiter’s radio waves first reach the sun and are then sent on to Earth. Using her solar model, she concludes that structures she calls “energy mirrors” inside the sun can reflect and amplify certain radio waves once they exceed a threshold.

This discovery changes the meaning of Red Coast’s capabilities. Ye understands that the sun is not just a source of interference but a gigantic amplifier, meaning humanity could use it as a superantenna and transmit signals into space with immensely greater power. She tries to obtain waveform data from the American astronomer Harry Peterson and also asks Red Coast leadership for permission to run an experiment, disguising its purpose as solar radar research. Lei refuses, not because the test is technically impossible, but because aiming a powerful transmission at the sun could be politically dangerous during that era.

Ye then acts on her own during a routine post-overhaul test transmission, when oversight is lax. She secretly raises the transmission power above the threshold, selects a likely amplifiable frequency, and manually aims the antenna at the setting sun while keeping the standard transmission content. Afterward, she rushes to Yang Weining and persuades him to have the base listen on the twelve-thousand-megahertz channel with an ordinary military radio, because Red Coast’s proper monitoring system cannot be switched over in time. Yang is alarmed by what she has done and warns her never to repeat it, but he helps her wait for the result.

No echo is detected, and the waveform records Peterson sends do not match the earlier solar-outage signals, so Ye concludes that her hoped-for proof has failed. The disappointment leaves her feeling that she is waking from a dream and returning to the gray emptiness of her life. Yet the chapter reveals that Ye is wrong about the larger result: even though no one at Red Coast hears it, her transmission has already been amplified by the sun and is racing outward through space, becoming humanity’s first star-powered broadcast to the universe.