Prologue · A Novel Nobody Took Seriously
That this record has survived to this day is a joke in itself.
It originally lay at the bottom of a trunk left behind by a writer after his suicide, pressed beneath several stacks of unfinished scripts. Before moving house, the writer’s family tidied up his belongings and came across it, assuming it was some unfinished sci-fi novel of his—starting with Neptune, five astronauts, and a glowing stone. It read convincingly enough, yet had neither head nor tail.
“Not finished, probably couldn’t go on writing it.” The family threw it into a corner of the storage room along with other scrap paper.
The next tenant was someone who liked rummaging through old things. He dug it out from a gap in the wall, read it, thought it interesting, and posted it online.
It caused no waves whatsoever.
People merely treated it as a novel—a decently written one. No one went to check on that 2068 expedition, nor did anyone remember those five names. For in all public records, the universe of 2068 was quiet, nothing happened at Neptune, and the first deep-space team sent by humanity was, according to textbooks, “unable to reach the intended target due to a technical fault; task terminated.”
One sentence. Without even the names of those five people.
Yet in this “novel,” its opening goes like this—
In 2068, NASA discovered that the angle between Neptune’s magnetic axis and the planet’s rotational axis had changed from 47° to 50°.
Below is the known, final, and only account of that expedition. Its author is signed as “Gao Fangwen,” and its title is Memoirs. But it appeared among the belongings of another person—the Superstarkin writer who wrote Biography of Claude and later fell off a cliff.
The main text of the memoirs begins here. The main text of the memoirs also comes to an abrupt halt on the same page.
I. Three Degrees
Supposedly, it was Neptune’s magnetic field that tampered first.
In 2068, Earth’s deep-space telescopes observed an anomaly for three consecutive months: Neptune’s already bizarre magnetic axis had shifted another three degrees, tilting from 47° to 50°. On the scale of planetary science, three degrees is a signal bordering on a roar—it meant that inside this ice giant, something was churning.
NASA decided to send people to take a look.
The risks were obvious. Neptune is thirty astronomical units from the Sun, sunlight takes four hours to reach it, the temperature is two hundred degrees below zero year-round, and supersonic winds blow through its atmosphere at six hundred meters per second. With any tiny misstep, rescue would be too late.
So it became an “international affair.” Countries vied to send NASA their best astronauts, less for science than to leave their nation’s name in the history of humanity’s first arrival at Neptune. In the end, five were selected: Gao Fangwen and Leng Yan from Asia, Alexander and Rick from Europe, and Frank from the Americas.
The team leader was Gao Fangwen. This “novel”—the draft of Memoirs—came precisely from his hand.
If he really wrote it.
The five blasted off in the spring of 2068. Earth raised glasses to see them off. The front page of every newspaper carried the same sentence: Humanity, Arriving at Neptune.
That was the last time they appeared in any publicly distributed newspaper.
II. Triton
They did not land on Neptune itself, but on its moon—Triton.
Triton is one of the coldest places in the Solar System. Its surface is draped in a layer of frozen nitrogen, pale pink, like a frost that never thaws. Here, the Sun is merely an exceptionally bright star, suspended in a sky of perpetual twilight.
The landing was smooth. The Explorer landed on a flat ice sheet. The five walked out in heavy EVA suits; their footprints pressed down, making a dull sound like crushing a sugar shell. As planned, they set up magnetic field detectors and erected a launch platform for a simple aircraft. Everything was professional, quiet, fitting the solemnity proper for a “human first.”
—Until the ground began to tremble.
Gao Fangwen was the first to notice. Squatting beside the detector, his gloved hand pressed against the ice, he felt a continuous, low-frequency vibration beneath his feet, like a giant beast turning over beneath the crust. He glanced up at the meters; no readings were abnormal, yet he stood up.
“Everyone back to the ship.” His voice was flat in the comms channel. “Pause what you’re doing and get back to the ship. Wait for this to pass.”
The four started heading back. But Rick and Frank were 1.7 kilometers away—their rover had stalled on the return trip, and both were lying under the vehicle making urgent repairs, out of reach of the ship.
Gao Fangwen shouted in the channel for them to hurry.
They could not hurry.
On the distant horizon, a column of white mist rose first. Then came the sound.
—Later reports called that mountain a “cryovolcano.” There are many such mountains on Triton. They do not erupt with magma, but with liquid nitrogen, water, hydrogen, and methane. On a surface near absolute zero, once these substances burst out of the crust, they freeze into ice almost instantly, piling up into transparent ice walls that crash down as hail.
This eruption’s scale far exceeded any model’s prediction.
The sound arrived before the light. It was not an explosion, but a profound, chest-crushing thud, as if someone had struck the entire moon like a drum. Immediately after, a column of water shot into the sky twenty kilometers away, sprayed into the thin atmosphere, freezing midair into translucent ice walls several stories high, before crashing thunderously back to the ground.
In an instant, the sky became a waterfall of ice. Countless hailstones, large as fists, small as bullets, rained down relentlessly, pounding onto detectors, EVA suits, and the hull of The Explorer, making a dense noise like iron hammers striking thin sheet metal.
“Take off! Take off now!” Gao Fangwen charged into the cockpit and started the engine.
The Explorer roared, lifting off the ground. It rose—less than twenty meters up—and then a falling wall of ice struck its tail fin dead-on.
Losing balance, the ship failed to leave Triton. Slanted, it crashed back from midair onto the ground. And at the exact moment it hit the surface, the ice sheet beneath cracked open.
That fissure came without warning, like a giant hand tearing open a gash in Triton’s skin from underground. The Explorer lost all power, sliding down along the crack, sliding down, sliding down, sliding down—
Plunging deep underground.
Later, Earth took a long time to piece together the final images inside the cabin.
The impact slammed Alexander’s head hard against the alloy plate of the cabin wall. He died on the spot. He was the first among the five names to die, and the most decisive.
A metal sheet shaken loose from the cabin ceiling sliced off Leng Yan’s entire right arm. The cut was as clean as if done by a paper cutter.
Gao Fangwen, unconscious.
Communications, severed.
Earth lost The Explorer. In all official records, the story ended right here. One sentence: “Task terminated.”
Yet in that draft treated as a novel, the story had only just begun.
III. The Laboratory
When Gao Fangwen woke, he saw a fluorescent light on the ceiling.
Very white, very glaring, humming faintly. It was a fluorescent light from Earth. Triton had no such lights; Triton had no lights at all.
He lay on an examination table. Around him were familiar instruments, familiar blueprints, the familiar wall covered in sticky notes—his laboratory on Earth.
Leng Yan lay on another table right beside him.
Gao Fangwen thought he was dead. He sat up, his entire body wracked with pain, like a wrung-out ragdoll. He looked down at his hands—still there. Looked at his legs—still there. Looked at Leng Yan—
Leng Yan’s injuries were completely healed. The gashes carved into his face by ice were gone. His bruised and fractured ribs were healed. The suit torn open revealed skin underneath—smooth, intact, as if he had never been injured.
Except for that right arm.
That right arm sliced off in its entirety by the metal sheet had not returned. The skin over the stump was healed into a smooth, rounded end, as though the arm was meant to end right there from the start, as though this body had “accepted” its disappearance.
Leng Yan was still asleep. Gao Fangwen did not wake him. He sat on the examination table, staring at his intact colleague and that unnervingly calm stump, for a long time.
Then he saw that stone in the corner of the laboratory.
—It just lay there quietly on the workbench. Dusty grey, thoroughly unremarkable, slightly larger than a fist, no different from any pebble you could pick up on any riverbank.
It should not have been here.
It should not have been anywhere. For it came from deep under Triton, from the depths of that fissure, from that period after The Explorer fell when everyone had lost consciousness.
No one knew how deep the ship had fallen.
No one knew what had happened down there.
No one knew how they returned—a ship for five was scrapped, supplies in the cabin couldn’t last three days, communications were totally severed, and they lay beneath a dead star three billion kilometers from Earth, with theoretically zero possibility of returning home.
Yet Gao Fangwen woke up, woke up on Earth. Leng Yan woke up, woke up on Earth, with a fully healed body and an arm gone forever. Alexander was dead, died on Triton. Rick and Frank fell into the fissure, missing, never appearing in any record again.
And that stone came back with them.
In his draft, Gao Fangwen wrote only one sentence about this period:
When I woke, I found that Leng Yan and I had returned to the laboratory on Earth. Strangely, Leng Yan’s injuries were fully healed, yet his right arm remained severed.
And then, nothing more.
All the pages following this were blank. As if something had neatly clipped away everything that followed.
IV. Necrodelirium
At first, the stone did nothing.
It simply stayed there, dusty grey on the workbench, wiped, weighed, tested over and over by spectrometers, mass spectrometers, and every instrument humanity possessed at the time. The results were uniform: a stone. Ordinary composition, ordinary structure, nothing anomalous. Scientists looked at each other, not knowing why Gao Fangwen had gone through such trouble to bring it back.
Until one day—no one remembers which day, nor whose hand touched which switch—it was activated.
It was a light belonging to no known spectrum.
Emerald green. Exceedingly bright, exceedingly pure, bright as though growing directly from inside the stone, from somewhere deeper than atoms. It was not reflected; it “welled” forth, silently soaking the entire laboratory and everyone’s face in a ghostly green.
People exposed to this light continuously would catch a disease.
Its onset was slow, so slow that at first you thought you were merely tired. First, eyes went unfocused; call their name, no response. Next, the body began to move uncontrollably—not twitching, but making movements. Some would laugh, laughing mechanically for long stretches, corners of the mouth pulled back to impossible angles; some would weep, shedding tears without sound; some would suddenly stand up, walk to a corner, and bang their foreheads against the wall stroke by stroke, not stopping even when bleeding.
No matter how you yelled at him, shook him, or forced his face to turn toward you—it was useless. His eyes were open, his body was moving, but inside, he was empty.
The authorities gave it a scientific name: Necrodelirium.
The common folk called it Necrodelirium.
“The Undying Cancer,” “The Cursed Malady”—people exhausted every horrific term. For its route of transmission remains unknown to this day. Some blamed water sources, some blamed the air, and someone, on a late-night forum, wrote a reply no one dared to forward:
Perhaps all of us have long been afflicted. We simply haven’t shown symptoms yet.
The body moves, but the heart is dead. Somewhat like brain death, but not entirely. The most severe cases would even bite people.
That green stone was sealed away immediately.
And all research records, footage, and even that laboratory itself surrounding it quietly vanished from the Earth on a day that followed.
Along with Gao Fangwen’s name.
V. The Follower
But the stone was not the only thing that came back.
The first to notice the anomaly was the night-shift security guard of the building where the lab was located. He reported to management: at night, he always heard sounds at the end of the corridor. Not footsteps, but a very light sound of a sharp tool dragging across a metal wall—shhh, shhh, shhh, immensely patient, stroke by stroke.
Management checked; there was nothing. On the security camera, the corridor was empty.
Later, this sound began to appear in other cities.
It had no sound, no smell, and ordinary lights could not reveal it. You could only infer its presence by the aftermath: a titanium alloy doorframe sliced off cleanly, the cut smooth as a mirror, as if slashed through by something sickle-shaped; a stray cat left in half; a locked door opened from the inside.
No one could see it.
Many years later, when the other side of this world was finally known to a very few, they would give this thing a designation—001—and a name:
The Invisible Ones.
It came from beneath Triton, or rather, from somewhere deeper that ought not be touched. Its arms were a mantis’s sickles, capable of slicing through titanium alloy steel plates with ease; its head was tiny, very fragile, readable to be cut down by ordinary blades—but if you couldn’t see it, how could you strike?
It seemed to be looking for something. Preliminary assessment: the stone.
Yet in 2068, no one knew these things. People only knew that from the day those five astronauts and that stone returned to Earth, in some corner of the world, there was an invisible thing dragging a sickle.
Initially, it had followed Gao Fangwen to Earth.
No one knew how far Gao Fangwen had brought it from underground.
Epilogue · The After That Never Was
The draft of Memoirs breaks off here.
Not because it was finished, but because there was no after. “There was no content after this.” —This sentence was a note added by the tenant who found the draft at the end of his post.
No one knows where the Source Stone went.
This history does not exist in textbooks either. It lives only in this “novel” no one took seriously, living at the bottom of a trunk left by a writer deemed a madman who fell off a cliff.
What about Gao Fangwen himself?
Rumor has it he lived to four hundred years old. Of course, impossible to verify. Rumor also says he finally died in a prison, the official charge being “theft.” A man who brought humanity’s first Source Stone back to Earth, a name that ought to be carved at the very top of a monument, his final official conviction was—theft.
What he stole was not stated in the verdict.
Yet that emerald stone, that beam of light belonging to no spectrum, did not vanish with this.
It simply changed places and hid away, hiding deeper than top-secret archives, patiently, quietly waiting—
Waiting for the next person bold enough to light it up again.
That would be four hundred years later. It would be a young man named Claude. He would be called a “mad scientist” by posterity, his name wiped clean from all textbooks in a single stroke, and he would die in a prison, the official story being that he covered his own face with a plastic bag.
But before then, in 2068, he was not yet born.
In 2068, there was only a beam of green light, standing alone in some forgotten laboratory on Earth, shining for a moment, then going out.
No one saw it.
—End of Chapter 1.