Using Ye Wenjie's introduction, Wang Miao drives to the Miyun radio astronomy observatory to see data in Sha Ruishan's lab. Wang asks to monitor impossible large-scale fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and Sha initially treats the request as a joke because such changes should be undetectably slow on human timescales. Even so, Sha sets up a simple real-time observation, and while waiting he gives Wang a tour and talks about Ye's past, including her father's death during the Cultural Revolution, her persecution, and her long-hidden service at Red Coast Base.

As one o'clock approaches, Wang grows increasingly tense and pushes Sha to return to the lab. Right on time, the flat green line turns into a red waveform. Sha checks the other satellite feeds and contacts another observatory, and all four data sources show the same synchronized fluctuation, confirming that the apparent change is not a single instrument failure.

Wang immediately prints the waveform and compares its peaks and gaps to a Morse code chart. He decodes the same countdown that has been haunting him, now reduced to 1,108 hours, showing that ninety-two hours have already elapsed. Sha demands an explanation, but Wang refuses, and Sha then proposes a direct visual test with "3K glasses," a planetarium device that converts cosmic microwave background radiation into visible red light.

Wang rushes to the Capital Planetarium and borrows several pairs of the glasses. Through them, he sees the entire night sky glowing faint red and pulsing irregularly: the universe itself appears to flicker. The sight overwhelms him, making the cosmos feel cramped, hostile, and alive with an incomprehensible presence; afterward, he starts seeing random flickers and movements around the city as if everything were sending him messages.

Deeply shaken, Wang calls Shen Yufei and asks what happens when the countdown ends, but she only says that she does not know. He drives through the nearly empty city before dawn, imagining disaster, death, or world-ending consequences at the end of the remaining hours. Exhausted, he wanders to St. Joseph's Church, where music and emotional collapse finally break his self-control, and he begins to cry.

At that lowest point, Wang hears laughter and turns to find Shi Qiang standing behind him. The chapter ends with Wang's private terror exposed and with outside intervention returning just as he seems close to total psychological collapse.