More than forty years after Ye Wenjie's arrival at Red Coast, nanotechnology researcher Wang Miao is visited at home by two police officers and two PLA officers. The rude, chain-smoking Captain Shi Qiang questions Wang about his recent contact with the Frontiers of Science, an influential academic group. The military officers then escort Wang to a secretive meeting at a suburban compound, where the disorderly, exhausted atmosphere suggests an urgent crisis.

At the meeting, Major General Chang Weisi presides over a mixed group of military officers, police, scientists, and even foreign intelligence and military observers. Wang learns that a "Battle Command Center" has been formed and that those involved speak openly of a war, though no one explains what the enemy is. Shi complains that the police are being used without being fully informed, and Chang makes clear that extraordinary methods are being tolerated because the situation is grave.

Chang then presents a list of elite physicists who have committed suicide in the past two months. Wang is shaken to find Yang Dong's name on it. In a flashback, Wang remembers first seeing Yang at the Sinotron II particle accelerator site a year earlier, discovering that the famous theorist was a young woman, and privately becoming fascinated by her presence and beauty. Back in the meeting room, Wang learns that Yang died by sleeping-pill overdose two nights earlier.

Ding Yi, identified by Shi as Yang's boyfriend, gives Wang Yang's short suicide note: "All the evidence points to a single conclusion: Physics has never existed, and will never exist." Chang explains that many of the dead physicists had ties to the Frontiers of Science. Ding describes the group as a response to modern physics reaching a possible limit, with members trying to use science to determine the boundaries of scientific knowledge itself.

Wang explains that he met the group's members through Shen Yufei and had attended only theoretical discussions, declining formal membership. Chang asks Wang to join the Frontiers of Science and report back so the authorities can understand the organization from inside. Wang first refuses, but after Shi mocks the dead scientists and doubts Wang's resilience, Wang angrily agrees in order to prove Shi wrong, while insisting he does not want to be a spy. As Wang leaves, Chang hints that humanity's long run of historical good fortune has ended and a true crisis has begun. In the car, after learning the driver had just brought Ding Yi to the meeting, Wang asks to be taken to Ding's address instead of home.