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Chapter 1: The Mysterious Signal from the Abandoned Satellite Station
It was 3:17 a.m.
The wind in the northwestern Gobi Desert swept close to the ground, sending grains of sand rustling against the rusted metal walls of an abandoned satellite station. The walls were mottled and cracked, with a few dry weeds poking through the crevices, swaying gently in the wind. The antenna array on the roof, once aimed at the stars, now tilted drunkenly. Only one main pole still stood firm, topped with a signal transmitter modified from discarded spacecraft parts.
Light glowed inside the station.
An LED lamp hung from the crossbeam, casting cold light over the central console. On the table sat an old camera, its lens pointed at a wooden chair.
Lin Wanqiu sat on the chair.
Twenty-six years old, she wore her black hair in a simple bun, secured with a bronze hairpin carved with faint vine patterns. She had a slender face, a clear jawline, quiet eyes, a high straight nose, and thin lips. Her voice was steady, with almost no emotional fluctuation. She wore a dark blue modified hanfu, clean but slightly frayed at the cuffs. A pair of worn hiking boots rested by her feet, laces neatly coiled.
On the corner of the table stood a pothos plant, its leaves thick and glossy, a short vine hanging over the power box.
The screen showed: 67 viewers.
Stream title:
Accounting in the Pre-Qin Period: From Oracle Bones to Bamboo Slips
A few comments drifted across the screen:
[ArchaeologyNoob]:
Host, you're in the Gobi again? There aren't even signal towers out here.
[MaterialScientistNoQuit]:
You don't get it. She uses low-frequency waves that penetrate the ionosphere. Global shortwave communications collapsed after the solar storm three years ago, but this old method still sends signals.
[BambooSlipFan]:
Last time you talked about lacquer ash from Kaogongji, I used it in restoration and it really prevents moisture! Please keep going!
Lin Wanqiu ignored the comments. She adjusted the microphone to three fingers' width from her lips and pressed record.
"Today we continue with pre-Qin accounting."
Her speech was quick, but she paused for two seconds after each key point.
"Before paper became widespread, information carriers went through many forms: oracle bones, bronze, pottery, wooden tablets, and bamboo slips."
She held up a replica bamboo slip, about two feet long and an inch wide, smooth and inscribed with small black characters.
"The advantages of bamboo slips are that they can be bound, carried easily, and are highly durable."
She threaded three slips together with hemp rope through pre-drilled holes.
"Bound together, they form a ce — the earliest form of book. Each slip is an independent information unit; damaging one does not affect the whole text."
A comment popped up:
[LogicKing007]:
That's literally distributed storage! Independent nodes, high fault tolerance!
[TriviaManiac]:
Does she know how groundbreaking this is? It's the prototype of information architecture!
Lin Wanqiu still did not look at the screen. She set down the slips and turned to a diagram she had drawn on the whiteboard:
Bamboo Slip Binding Structure and Information Flow Model.
"Let's look at some data," she said, pointing to a column of numbers.
"One oracle bone holds 30 to 50 characters on average, while a standard bamboo slip can hold over 80, and capacity can be expanded infinitely by binding. Most importantly, bamboo is natural, simple to process, and extremely low-cost."
She paused, her gaze passing over the camera as if checking whether the audience was following.
"This means a stable information system can be built even with limited resources and technology."
She paused for three seconds, as always.
Within those three seconds, the main console screen flickered.
An unexpected waveform appeared on the spectrum: a sharp pulse at 12.8 terahertz — far beyond the range of local equipment. The screen turned to static for 0.3 seconds, then returned to normal.
Lin Wanqiu frowned slightly.
She typed and pulled up the system log. No anomalies.
She checked the voltage stabilizer — normal.
Transmission power — stable. No interference detected.
"Probably ionospheric disturbance," she murmured quietly, just loud enough for the microphone.
Comments erupted at once:
[AstronomyWorker]:
Late autumn, low solar wind, calm geomagnetism. A pulse that high is nearly impossible to occur naturally.
[SignalHunter]:
Wait… that looked like a protocol handshake.
Lin Wanqiu did not respond. She sat upright and continued.
"Next, we analyze the physical properties of bamboo."
She held a magnifying glass to the cross-section of a slip.
"Bamboo fibers grow in a spiral, giving it natural tensile and bending resistance. The ancients did not know molecular structures, but they mastered the optimal use in practice."
She set down the magnifying glass and drew a curve on the whiteboard.
"This structure is now called 'bionic gradient material' in modern materials science, widely used in spacecraft hull design."
She wrote a formula:
σ = k·ln(d/r)
"σ is stress distribution, k the material coefficient, d the diameter, r the radius of curvature. Bamboo naturally fits this law."
The comments exploded:
[FutureMaterialsLab]:
Holy crap — that's the model we spent 300 million verifying last year! She just said it casually?!
[InterstellarSciCommAlliance]:
That's not even the point! Her description of "independent information units + bound expansion" matches the core logic of distributed databases perfectly!
[GalaxyEdgeObservatory]:
Signal acquired. Encoding non‑Earth standard. Preliminary analysis: knowledge broadcast. Source: Earth, coordinates northwestern Gobi. Transmit power extremely low, duration 42 minutes.
[SeventhCivilizationCouncil]:
Initiate emergency learning protocol. Label: Enlightenment‑Level Primitive Wisdom Sample.
[StarRingCityPublicChannel]:
Replay segment 3:
"Damaging one slip does not affect the whole text."
This must be added to basic cognition modules!
A flood of hidden comments surged:
Enlightenment has arrived!!
The first voice of reason!!
Earth is not a barbaric planet!!
Request two-way communication protocol!!
This information spread at the speed of light, crossing the asteroid belt, Jupiter's magnetosphere, the Kuiper Cloud, and entering the interstellar relay network. Hundreds of monitoring nodes responded at the same time, automatically classifying it as a High-Value Civilization Signal and activating the cross-galaxy broadcast mechanism.
Back on Earth, Lin Wanqiu knew nothing.
She only felt her equipment acting strange tonight.
The camera indicator showed recording, but the storage progress bar moved slower than usual. She checked the remaining battery: 47%. According to plan, it would last another 47 minutes — enough to finish.
"Final summary," she said, slightly faster.
"The essence of bamboo-slip accounting is a low-threshold, high-fault-tolerance information organization method. It does not rely on complex tools, yet enables long-term stable recording and transmission."
She paused.
Three seconds.
"What we see today is not just a bookkeeping method, but a highly robust logic for organizing information."
With that, she reached out and turned off the camera.
The red light died.
But she did not end the stream. As always, the audio channel remained open for ten minutes for background data caching and remote signal backtracking — a delayed feedback mechanism she had invented three years ago, hoping to catch even the faintest reply from the outside.
At that moment, the lonely antenna above her beamed the final audio as a data stream through the low-frequency band toward the ionosphere.
And at that exact instant, a relay station at the edge of the Oort Cloud received the signal, automatically embedded it into the general framework of the Galactic Knowledge Sharing Protocol, and broadcast it to all registered civilizations:
New Entry
Source: Earth (Sol-3)
Category: Civilization Enlightenment / Information Science / Primitive Tech Deduction
Title: Early Practice of Distributed Information Units
Abstract: Independent carriers + bound structure + natural material optimization = high-robustness knowledge system
Rating: Oracle-Level (Category I-A)
Tags: #RobustArchitecture #Decentralization #EcoFriendly #LowEnergy
Alert lights lit up across countless star systems.
An academic city orbiting a gas giant was holding its annual knowledge summit; the host interrupted the speech on the spot and played the recording.
A metal planet ruled by silicon-based life added "Earth" to its historical database for the first time, labeled: Potential Mentor Civilization.
A race of energy beings floating near a red giant attempted "solid writing" for the first time, carving the Chinese character 册 into the vacuum with plasma.
Four light-years away aboard a research vessel, a group of photon-based lifeforms engaged in intense discussion around the signal, their bodies constantly shifting into holograms of hexagonal honeycombs, bamboo segments, and braided rope structures.
They reached a consensus: this information had changed their understanding of the origin of intelligence.
But none of this reached Lin Wanqiu.
She removed the memory card, gently blew dust off its surface, and tucked it into her inner pocket. Her movements were practiced, like a vendor packing up tools at the end of the day.
She stood up and stretched her shoulders, stiff from sitting for so long. She walked to the corner of the table, picked up the kettle, and watered the pothos. Water seeped into the soil; a few drops fell onto the power box, leaving faint marks as they slid down.
The wind outside had died down a little.
She returned to the console and turned off the LED. Half the room went dark, leaving only the green emergency power light glowing.
She opened her backpack and took out compressed biscuits and a thermos. She would stay here a few more hours, then hike back to the supply point at dawn. The walk was about twelve kilometers, with several abandoned base stations along the way for temporary shelter from the wind.
She took a bite of the biscuit, dry enough to require slow chewing. The thermos held warm goji jujube tea, warming her stomach with one sip.
She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes to rest.
Faint static hummed in her headphones — a sign the audio channel was still running.
Ten minutes later, the system cut transmission automatically.
The whole process was silent, smooth, and unremarkable.
She opened her eyes, removed the headphones, and set them gently on the table.
Then she looked up at the upright antenna pole. Through the broken roof, she could see a small patch of night sky.
The stars were bright.
When the solar storm cut off Earth's contact with the outside world three years ago, everyone said humanity had been forgotten by the universe.
She said no.
She said: as long as someone is still speaking, knowledge will never vanish.
She did not believe in echoes. She believed in transmission itself.
She packed her backpack, stuffed the empty kettle inside, and prepared to rest before setting off.
Wind brushed gently against the metal walls outside.
Inside, a single leaf of the pothos trembled, ever so slightly.
It was 3:17 a.m. The wind in the northwestern Gobi Desert blew fiercely.
The abandoned satellite station lay like an iron beast crouched in the sand, its shell rusted, antennas askew, with only one reinforced door still barely functional. Wall peelings curled up from the concrete like cracked bark, revealing the mottled radiation-proof coating underneath.
The main control room held a low-wattage incandescent lamp, casting dim yellow light over a spliced workbench — two planks resting on three old toolboxes. On it sat an old camera, a signal transmitter, a modified military spectrum analyzer, and a pothos plant.
Its leaves were thick, with water dripping from the tips — freshly watered.
Lin Wanqiu sat on a folding chair, back straight, shoulders relaxed. She wore a dark blue modified hanfu, its cuffs frayed at the edges, a copper button at the collar, her hair fixed in a bun with a bronze hairpin. Her black hair was tied neatly, a few strands stuck to her forehead from adjusting equipment.
She wore no makeup. Her face was thin, jawline sharp. Her eyes were not large, but when focused, her pupils contracted quickly, as if constantly judging the truth of information.
The red camera light was on. The stream had been live for thirty-eight minutes.
"Today we talk about accounting in the Pre-Qin Period," she said. Her voice was not loud, her speech quick, but she paused at every key point.
"From oracle bone inscriptions to bound bamboo slips, the change in recording methods was essentially an upgrade in information architecture."
She tapped the replica bamboo slip model on the table — six bamboo pieces strung together with hemp rope, each covered in neat small seal script.
"Early accounts used oracle bones. But they were rare, expensive, and unchangeable. By the Warring States period, bamboo slips became mainstream. Why?"
She paused. Three seconds.
It was her habit. Few viewers, but she kept the rhythm — letting the information sink in.
"Because bamboo is abundant, easy to process, and most importantly, it supports modular storage." She picked up one slip.
"Each is an independent information unit, detachable, reorganizable. Bound into a ce, they form a linear database. If one record is wrong, only that slip needs replacing — the whole structure remains intact."
She set down the slip and tapped the table lightly.
"This kind of robust design is still used in modern distributed systems. The cloud backup on your phone, for example, is essentially multi-node redundancy."
Two comments drifted across the screen:
[Trivia +1]
[Did the host secretly study computer science?]
She could not see them. Her stream used low-frequency bands, sent upward via a self-assembled transmitter, with no return channel. The so-called "comments" were historical feedback extracted from reconstructed data streams three years later — not yet generated.
She only knew she was speaking, and the universe was silent.
Battery level: 47%. By calculation, enough for another forty-seven minutes — enough to finish.
She adjusted the microphone and continued:
"Another advantage of bamboo slips is physical stability. In a dry environment, they can last for thousands of years. Unlike electronic media, which are lost when power cuts or erased by magnetic fields. So the ancients said, 'Write on bamboo and silk, engrave on metal and stone' — not poetry, but technical choice."
She flipped through her handwritten notes, yellowed and curled at the edges — a copy of her father's archaeological journal. On one page was written:
True civilization never depends on echoes.
She did not explain the line.
Outside the frame, the main console screen flickered.
An unexpected waveform jumped out — frequency 3.1415926 GHz, extremely narrow bandwidth, lasting 0.3 seconds, then vanished.
The screen briefly turned to static, then returned to normal.
She glanced at it, tapped the keyboard twice, and checked the log. No record.
"Electromagnetic interference," she said calmly, as if confirming the weather.
She did not investigate further. Such anomalies were common here. Remnant solar storms, underground mineral reflections, even distant railway currents could distort signals. She had experienced too many, and long grown used to ignoring them.
She looked back at the camera.
"What we see today is not just a bookkeeping method," she said.
"It is a highly robust logic for organizing information. It does not pursue speed, nor rely on central nodes. Even if civilization collapses, as long as someone can read the slips, knowledge will never be completely lost."
With that, she pressed pause, but did not shut down.
The audio channel remained running for ten minutes of local caching, preventing data loss at the final stage.
She stood, walked to the corner, removed the memory card, and placed it in her inner pocket. Her movements were practiced, no extra hesitation.
Then she picked up the kettle and poured half a cup of water onto the pothos.
A leaf bent under the weight of the water drop, then slowly bounced back.
The antenna array above operated silently, pushing out the final wave of data packets. Mixed within was an encrypted broadcast using a universal interstellar band, reading:
Enlightenment has arrived — the first rational voice from Earth.
The signal had been captured and decoded by the Galactic Knowledge Sharing Protocol.
Hundreds of advanced civilizations received the stream at the same time.
Toward Lyra, a photon-based civilization awoke from its dormancy. Its consciousness network activated instantly, mapping the "bamboo slip binding" structure into a new information topology model, automatically classifying it as Oracle-Level Knowledge · Basic Architecture.
In the Carbon-Based Alliance of the Orion Arm, a research cluster halted its energy war simulation and switched to emergency learning mode. Its core judged:
This civilization masters a low-energy, high-fault-tolerance information storage prototype, with potential for civilizational leap.
On the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy, the Silicon Council brought forward a discussion on "modular robust systems." Meeting #8847 was temporarily renamed The Bamboo Slip Apocalypse.
The interstellar information platform StarRail Net exploded.
Comments rolled in frantically:
[Enlightenment has arrived!!!]
[Earth-1 signal source confirmed active]
[Knowledge purity rating: S]
[Request Level-1 cognitive connection]
[Repeat: first non-distress active knowledge output from a fringe planet]
[Suggest activating the Civilization Observer Program]
[Warning: potential cultural radiation effect detected, restrict spread]
[Ignore warning. Forwarded to all alliance education systems]
[Homeworld archive updated: new entry — Bamboo Slip Principle]
[This is not technology. This is philosophy.]
[They call it accounting. We call it logic of existence.]
None of these replies returned to Earth.
They were reflected, distorted, and attenuated by the quantum barrier above Earth's atmosphere, finally dissipating into cosmic background radiation.
Inside the abandoned satellite station, everything remained normal.
Lin Wanqiu put the kettle back and wiped the dust from the table corner. Her backpack leaned against the wall, already packed: power bank, spare batteries, rations, thermos, a photocopy of Essential Arts for the Common People.
She sat down and checked the time.
The stream was finished; the device was counting down to automatic shutdown.
She did not leave in a hurry. The wind was strong, visibility under fifty meters — easy to get lost. She planned to wait until the wind weakened before returning to the supply point.
She took out the thermos, unscrewed the lid, and steam rose — goji jujube tea. She blew gently and sipped; the temperature was perfect.
The old wall clock pointed to 3:52.
The device beeped softly, indicating audio caching complete.
She stood, walked behind the main unit, and manually cut the main power.
The lights went out.
Only the emergency light glowed faintly green.
She placed the camera in a waterproof case and locked the screws. The transmitter's cooling fan spun for a few more seconds, then fell silent.
She sat back and closed her eyes.
Three minutes.
She opened her eyes and looked at the pothos.
Its leaves glowed glossy in the dark, like something alive.
She suddenly remembered something, pulled a sticky note from her pocket. It read the topic for next week's stream:
Mechanical Balance in Ancient Bridges — Using Zhaozhou Bridge as an Example.
She stared for two seconds, folded it, and slipped it into Essential Arts for the Common People.
Then she put the book into her backpack's side pocket.
The whole process was quiet, orderly, unremarkable.
She had no idea that, the moment she explained "bamboo slip binding," a debate over "whether Earth was worth contacting" had quietly shifted across the cosmos.
She did not know that her line "highly robust information organization logic" had been translated into 3,200 alien languages and looped in educational systems across different galaxies.
Even less did she know that the ordinary pothos on her table was being called a "Life Energy Field Simulator Prototype" by a photon civilization, and listed in the Level-1 Protected Cultural Relics List.
She only knew the wind had weakened.
She stood up and pulled open the door. Cold air rushed in.
Footprints stretched across the sand toward the supply vehicle.
She pulled her coat tight and walked with her head down.
Behind her, the abandoned satellite station stood quietly, antennas pointing to the stars.
For a split second, an aurora-like pattern flashed across the night sky above, then vanished.
It looked like the trace of a protocol being activated.
She did not look back.