After finding Wang Miao in a shattered state, Shi Qiang takes him to a small restaurant, makes him eat and drink, and lets him talk. Wang, loosened by alcohol, recounts the last three days and describes the universe as seeming to "wink" at him. Shi rejects Wang’s supernatural framing and answers with his own blunt rule: anything sufficiently strange is probably the result of someone acting behind the scenes.

Their conversation also contrasts Wang’s cosmic fear with Shi’s practical outlook. Wang asks philosophical questions about humanity and the universe, but Shi says ordinary burdens—work, money, family, and cases—leave him no energy for such thoughts. Even so, Shi insists that bizarre events should be treated as deliberate rather than mystical, and he tells Wang that the immediate priority is to rest instead of spiraling further.

After sleeping in his car and recovering somewhat by the Forbidden City, Wang presses Shi for the truth. Shi admits he knows little, but explains the pattern he has assembled from his work: attacks on research institutions, the Liangxiang accelerator explosion, murders and suicides among scientists, bold anti-technology protests, expensive media glorifying a pre-scientific life, and well-funded cults. From these scattered signs, Shi concludes that a coordinated force is trying to destroy scientific research, confuse scientists, and turn society against science.

Shi then reveals that the stakes are larger than Wang realized. He says the military is treating the situation as a real war, with battle command centers around the world and unprecedented cooperation between major powers, even though the enemy remains unidentified. In Shi’s view, the enemy especially fears fundamental science, which is why researchers like Yang Dong were targeted, and Wang may also matter because his nanomaterials research threatens them in some unknown way.

By the end of the chapter, Shi gives Wang a practical response to this hidden war: return to work, continue his research, ignore the countdown as much as possible, and keep playing Three Body. Shi states outright that the game is connected to the larger plot and says knowledgeable people are studying it as well. Wang leaves the conversation with his personal terror reframed as part of a vast, organized assault on science itself.