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Broken porcelain shards lay on the floor tiles of the Ministry of Defense's duty room, and no one bothered to sweep them up.

The coffee stains slowly seeped into the cracks in the ground, while the white waves on the screen continued to surge.

From this moment on, the matter no longer belonged to the Japanese alone.

Fifteen minutes.

This is the total time required for the message to spread.

The US SBIRS early warning satellite was the first to sound an alarm—not for a missile launch, but for an unusual infrared event. Russia's Tundra system followed suit. Europe was forty seconds slower, but it also detected the shockwave data from that area of ​​the sea.

The three intelligence agencies retrieved the playback almost simultaneously, and then played it back frame by frame.

At normal speed, you can't see anything. There's only a flash of white light, and then the scene changes.

It must be done frame by frame.

In frame 127, six thin, white streaks appear at the top of the screen. Vertical. Straight. Without any steering correction.

Frame 131, Impact.

One Russian analyst watched the replay seven times, then took off his glasses and rubbed his face with his palm.

"It came from above," he said.

The colleague sitting next to me asked without looking up, "Where is up there?"

"Not above the atmosphere."

Social media reacts much faster than government agencies.

The first wave of rumors was about aliens. Someone took screenshots of the six beams of light and stitched them together into a nine-square grid, captioned "They're here," which garnered at least 200,000 reposts.

The second wave was a meteor shower. There was a heated debate on astronomy forums, with some people showing nearly three months of near-Earth object monitoring data and pointing to the screen, saying there was no forecast for this time of day.

The third wave was the most outrageous—someone confidently claimed that the US was testing a new toy, and because the parameters weren't adjusted correctly, it accidentally hit its own ally. This post received over ten thousand comments, half of which were laughing.

But people on the military forums didn't laugh.

A user with the ID "Old Artilleryman" posted a diagram. He marked the coordinates of the six impact points and connected them with lines.

A regular hexagon. The side length error is less than 200 meters.

The first reply below only had four words: It's over, it's over.

Article 2: Do natural meteorite clusters fall in geometric patterns?

The third article is a long one, breaking it down point by point from atmospheric re-entry angle, terminal velocity, and characteristics of shock wave propagation. The last sentence was upvoted and became a top comment:

There's only one explanation left—someone placed weapons outside of Earth.

The Quattroporte has three underground levels, forming a circular command center.

That 40-second replay has been played on a loop more than a dozen times.

A dozen or so people sat around a long table. Military uniforms, suits, epaulettes, and tie clips—the room exuded an aura of power that rivaled that of the entire Western Hemisphere.

No one spoke.

The island on the screen began to disintegrate at the thirty-first second. It didn't explode—it collapsed from the center, and then the entire rock layer was as if someone had ripped it up from below, breaking it into pieces of varying sizes, which then rushed upwards mixed with water vapor.

Three thousand meters.

The mushroom-shaped cloud column reached its highest point at the thirty-eighth second and then began to fall.

At the fortieth second, only the sea remains in the frame.

NSA Director Herman put down his pen, the cap of which he had dented.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he cleared his throat, his voice as dry as sandpaper, "I'll say a few numbers."

No one interrupted him.

"Terminal velocity, Mach 50 or higher. Release altitude, estimated to be between 300 and 400 kilometers, which is near Earth orbit. No heat signature throughout the entire process—because there is no fuel, it just falls."

He paused for a moment.

"Standard Missile 3 has insufficient maximum interception altitude. THAAD has insufficient terminal velocity. Ground-based midcourse interceptors have insufficient reaction time."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Holt remained motionless. He stared at the image frozen in the last frame, which showed only seawater and rubble.

Herman.

"President."

"What if those six shots hadn't hit that island," Holt said slowly, "but instead hit this building we're sitting in right now?"

It felt as if half the air in the room had been sucked away.

No one answered.

Because the answer is right there—the building where they're having their meeting right now, from the moment the warning went off to the moment it disappeared, only forty seconds. They couldn't even run out. They couldn't even get out of the corridor.

Holt put the pen he was holding on the table. The cap fell off.

"Keep releasing it," he said, "but slow it down by half."

The reliable guy sitting at the far end of the long table remained silent.

His tie was crooked, and it sat crooked for about ten minutes without anyone noticing.

He just stared at the screen, watching the six beams of white light fall down again and again.

When the eighteenth playback finished, he suddenly asked, "Is Hamilton still over there?"

Defense Secretary Jarvis looked up: "The USS Carl group is 47 nautical miles from the impact point and is on high alert."

"Did they see it?"

"I saw it. Hamilton's report said that the shockwave threw two people off the deck."

He stood up, very reliable.

The chair leg scraped against the floor with an unpleasant sound.

"Let them withdraw."

Jarvis didn't react immediately: "Sir?"

"Withdraw." The usually reliable voice was a whole tone lower than usual. "Now. Immediately. Withdraw everything."

There was a three-second silence in the conference room.

As has been the case for the past two decades, at this point, at least one person will step forward and say, "We need to maintain our presence," or "Withdrawing would send the wrong signal," or the old adage that has been around for decades—"show resolve."

No.

not a single one.

Holt reached for the red phone on the table and pressed the encrypted channel.

"Carl Squadron, this is Holt." He paused for half a second, "Execute full-speed evacuation immediately."

Hamilton's voice came through the phone, crackling with static: "Chairman, which direction should we evacuate to?"

"East," Holt said. "Don't stop, don't look back, and don't stay in any place for more than four hours."

"……clear."

The phone hangs up.

The room fell silent again.

He was leaning on the edge of the table, sweat beading on his forehead. The light shone on him, reflecting a little light off his face. He seemed oblivious to it.

Thirty minutes after the incident.

Inside the United Nations building, the cell phones of permanent representatives from various countries began to vibrate one after another.

Call volume on the leaders' hotline tripled within half an hour. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, India—all countries with military reconnaissance satellites are frantically scraping data.

The conclusions are largely the same.

Released into low Earth orbit. Terminal velocity exceeding Mach 50. No thermal emission. Untraceable trajectory. No nuclear residue.

The last one is the one that sends chills down your spine.

In an internal Russian analysis report, an unnamed military analyst wrote a sentence in the conclusion paragraph, which was later leaked to the public:

"If this is indeed Great Xia's technology—then from this day forward, the global strategic balance has been completely rewritten. It doesn't need to break through any defenses, because it doesn't come from defenses."

The Prime Minister's official residence in Japan.

The man who was waving his arms and declaring "the East China Sea is no longer the inland sea of ​​the Great Xia" in the parliament hall just fifteen minutes ago is now slumped in his office chair.

The tie was still on, and the suit jacket was still buttoned up.

But it's as if his spine has been removed.

The Minister of Defense stood before him, holding a report in his hands. The paper was trembling, so much so that a sound could be heard.

"Your Excellency Prime Minister...we have completed the verification."

"explain."

"All 1,347 team members on the island... have lost contact." The Defense Minister's voice tightened. "It's not a communication outage. It's... we've tried three separate communication links, plus civilian satellite phones, but there's been no response."

The Prime Minister's fingers curled slightly on the armrest.

"The island."

"Satellite images show..." The Defense Minister swallowed hard. "The island itself has completely sunk. The original water depth was 42 meters."

Forty-two meters.

The highest point on that island is seventeen meters above sea level.

The prime minister's lips trembled a few times, and his voice seemed to be squeezed out from between his teeth: "What does America say?"

The Defense Minister did not answer immediately.

"say."

"The Carl formation..." He lowered the paper in his hand slightly, "received orders from the mainland ten minutes ago and is now retreating eastward at full speed."

The Prime Minister gripped the armrests of his chair tightly.

withdraw.

Their biggest backer, their strongest guarantee, the country that yesterday wrote "unwavering commitment to alliance" in the joint statement—after seeing those six things falling from the sky, chose the simplest action.

run.

There was no joint statement. There was no freedom of navigation operation. There was not a single statement saying "We stand with our allies."

A thought suddenly popped into the Prime Minister's mind, and once it did, he couldn't suppress it anymore.

If next time.

The six things landed in Tokyo Bay.

From warning to landing, it takes forty seconds. How many seconds can the entire national air defense system give him?

Not even a second.

He sank into the back of the chair, as if his bones had been removed.

Tomson Riviera, dinner time.

"—Then Teacher Li said that my handwriting looked like a crab crawling!" Miao Miao said, gesturing as she spoke, drawing a line in the air with her chopsticks. "I said that a crab crawling is still crawling, as long as the character is recognizable, it's fine."

Li Niannian placed a piece of stir-fried shrimp into her bowl: "Eat first."

"But what I said makes sense."

"That makes sense, let's eat first."

From the kitchen came Zhou Dahai's off-key humming, and the bottom of the pot scraped loudly.

Li Yichen sat in his seat, drinking soup. It was lotus root and pork bone soup, which Uncle Zhou had simmered for over three hours; the broth was whitish in color.

The phone was on his right, screen down, on silent.

It has shaken many times.

Chen Jianjun, Liu Guoliang, Gu Shounian, and a few other unfamiliar numbers. He didn't click on any of them.

Ji Yanran sat opposite, holding a shrimp between her chopsticks. She had been holding it for a while but hadn't put it in her mouth.

She was looking at him.

Li Yichen finished the last sip of soup, put down the bowl, and looked up: "What are you looking at?"

"It's nothing." Ji Yanran popped a shrimp into her mouth and chewed slowly. "I just noticed you're in a good mood today."

"yes."

"Um."

Li Yichen smiled and said, "That's probably because the soup is delicious."

Ji Yanran did not respond to that sentence.

She lowered her head and continued eating, taking a couple of bites, her lips curving upwards slightly before disappearing again.

She hadn't been watching the news. She'd spent the entire afternoon negotiating contract terms with the car company's legal department and hadn't read a single word of the news, so she had no idea what Li Yichen was so happy about.

After dinner, Li Yichen returned to his study.

As soon as the door closed, Ling'er brought up the global public opinion panel, which covered the entire wall.

BBC headline: "The most bizarre military event of the century." CNN repeatedly played the blurry satellite image, inviting three experts to analyze the source of the light beam, and the three experts gave three different conclusions. The Peninsula's headline was the most direct—"East China Sea: An Island, Forty Seconds."

On domestic platforms within China, the official stance has remained completely silent.

But the comments section has been opened.

"Whether we did it or not, we had a good time."

"What meteorite? I don't believe you for a second. Meteorites can arrange themselves into hexagons?"

"Japan: I set off firecrackers in front of someone else's house, and the sky collapsed."

"I suggest sending a thank-you letter to that meteorite in the sky."

Ling'er lay on the edge of the projection, her two short legs swinging back and forth: "Brother, do you know how popular this is globally right now? Social media platforms in 37 languages ​​and 120 countries are all discussing the same thing."

"Um."

"But no one knows it was you."

Li Yichen leaned back in his chair and glanced up at the ceiling: "It's best if you never find out."

"Why?" Ling'er leaned closer. "It's so prestigious."

There are many things that are respectable, but not every one of them needs to be displayed on the wall.

One hour after the incident.

The press conference hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Great Xia was ablaze with flashes of light.

The spokesperson, dressed in a dark suit, walked onto the stage. He stopped in front of the microphone, glanced at his prepared remarks for a couple of seconds, and then looked up.

"We express our deepest condolences for the Japanese soldiers who lost their lives in the accident in the East China Sea today."

The pens of some reporters in the audience stopped moving.

"According to preliminary analysis by relevant Chinese scientific research institutions, the impact characteristics of this event—including the incident angle, energy release curve, and shock wave propagation model—are highly consistent with the physical model of a near-Earth asteroid debris field falling."

A blond reporter in the second row opened his mouth but didn't say anything.

"Based on humanitarian principles, we are willing to send professional rescue teams to assist relevant countries in their search and rescue efforts. Preparations are complete, and we await only a request from the other party."

The spokesperson paused for a moment.

Then comes the last sentence.

"At the same time, we solemnly declare that this incident has nothing to do with Da Xia."

The press conference room erupted in chaos.

Dozens of hands shot up at once, the shouts drowning out each other. Some people even stood on chairs, holding microphones up to the stage.

"Does Great Xia possess space-based strike capabilities?"

"The six impact points are distributed in a regular geometric pattern; how can this be explained using debris swarm analysis?"

Is Great Xia willing to accept an independent international investigation?

The spokesperson smiled into the microphone.

Thank you everyone.

He turned around and left.

His back view was clean and crisp, and he didn't stop for a moment.

The world reacted remarkably in unison after the statement was released.

No country has publicly questioned it.

The logic is simple—questioning is tantamount to admitting. It means admitting that Great Xia possesses a precision strike capability that originates from space, is unpredictable, uninterceptable, and untraceable.

You've admitted it, so what?

Who will fight it? And with what will they fight it?

There is no answer.

So everyone chose to remain silent.

After watching the live broadcast, the Prime Minister of Japan grabbed the teacup in front of him and smashed it on the ground. The celadon shattered completely.

The servants came in to tidy up, and he waved them out.

Forty minutes later, the official residence issued a statement.

The wording was so mild it was hard to believe.

"Japan is deeply saddened by this tragic incident and will fully cooperate with the international community in conducting relevant investigations."

There were no accusations. There was no retaliation. Not a single word was mentioned about Great Xia.

Because he knew very well—

If those six objects were to land in Tokyo again, the entire country's air defense systems combined wouldn't be able to provide even a second of warning.

From that day onward, no country in the East China Sea openly provoked Great Xia militarily.

not a single one.