First spell transmission

First spell transmission is the decisive experiment through which Luo Ji converts an apparently meaningless set of images into a cosmic threat. The broadcast does not attack Trisolaris directly; instead, it identifies a distant star system as a possible target, testing whether an advanced civilization would destroy a marked location in the universe. Its importance lies in the terrifying logic it exposes: in a dark forest filled with hidden civilizations, revealing a position may itself be an invitation to annihilation.

Design and Background

The plan is presented as a low-resource use of the Sun’s radio-wave magnification capabilities. A message will be sent into the cosmos containing three simple images, accompanied by information demonstrating that the images were produced by an intelligence rather than by a natural process. Each image consists of black dots scattered across a field, with one conspicuously larger dot indicated by an arrow. The simplicity of the images conceals their destructive function: they are not a conventional message but a precise astronomical sign.

Luo Ji’s preparation has been underway beneath his conscious awareness. After becoming a Wallfacer, he had continued thinking subconsciously, like a background process that kept working while his attention was occupied elsewhere. He eventually traced the entire situation back to his encounter with Ye Wenjie nine years earlier. Because Ye Wenjie was gone, the secret of that meeting was known only to Luo Ji and Trisolaris; he also understood that Sophons had been present near Yang Dong’s grave and had carried the conversation across four light-years. The spell therefore emerges from a long-hidden chain of observation, memory, and inference rather than from a sudden improvisation.

The Broadcast as a Spell

When the representatives ask what the images mean, Luo Ji breaks the expected silence by calling them a spell. He identifies its target as the planets of star 187J3X1, while allowing that the star itself could also be affected. The word transforms the transmission from a technical experiment into a performative act: naming the images a spell makes the audience confront the possibility that information can function as a weapon even when its immediate physical content is minimal.

The mechanism remains deliberately uncertain. Luo Ji cannot say what precise effect the spell will have, but he states that the consequence will be catastrophic. The uncertainty is part of the event’s power. The transmission does not depend on a fully understood destructive device; it depends on the probable response of other civilizations to a location that has been conspicuously identified. Its danger therefore rests less on visible force than on the social meaning of a mark in an inhabited universe.

Target, Distance, and Limitation

Luo Ji presents 187J3X1 as a proof of concept rather than the final target. The actual implementation, he explains, will wait for the Doomsday Battle. He refuses to direct the spell at Trisolaris because the system is too close: the effects might reach the Solar System. For that reason, he rejects every planetary star system within fifty light-years.

The timing makes the broadcast both urgent and remote. Since 187J3X1 is approximately fifty light-years from the Sun, the spell can be completed in no less than fifty years, while its effects cannot be observed for one hundred years at the earliest. Even those figures are only minimum estimates; the process may take much longer. The delay separates action from confirmation and leaves humanity unable to verify the result within an ordinary human lifetime. The transmission is thus an experiment whose success may remain inaccessible to the people who initiate it.

Actual Transmission and Cosmic Logic

Two days after Luo Ji’s public explanation, high-power radio waves leave Earth and travel toward the Sun. They penetrate the convection zone and reach the energy mirror in the radiation zone, where the Sun reflects and magnifies them hundreds of millions of times. In this transformed state, Luo Ji’s spell enters the cosmos at the speed of light. A private plan becomes an astronomical event, carried not by a purpose-built spacecraft but by the natural structure of the Sun itself.

Later, Luo Ji clarifies the content of the three images. Each contains thirty points representing the planar projection of a three-dimensional coordinate system. When combined, the images produce a cubic space containing the relative positions of 187J3X1 and twenty-nine surrounding stars, with a label identifying 187J3X1. The broadcast therefore provides enough relational information to locate the system without simply displaying an isolated point. Its apparent abstraction is precisely what makes it legible to civilizations capable of reconstructing the coordinates.

Luo Ji explains the threat through the image of a hunter in a dark forest who discovers a conspicuous patch of stripped bark bearing a recognizable position. The hunter is unlikely to assume that supplies have been left there. The safer inference is that the mark identifies live prey. Even if many civilizations ignore the signal, some may investigate, and at least one may decide that firing on the location is safer and less troublesome than approaching it. The event’s weapon is therefore the possibility that another civilization will interpret the broadcast according to survival logic rather than benevolence.

Consequences and Significance

The auditorium’s reaction reveals how quickly the spell acquires religious language. After Luo Ji describes the catastrophic effect, the United States representative calls it a god, while the United Kingdom representative jokes that it is a god hiding in a cellar. Their laughter does not dissolve the danger; it shows the human effort to domesticate an incomprehensible power through irony. A technical transmission becomes a secular ritual, with Luo Ji placed in the position of someone who can invoke forces beyond ordinary human control.

The later history of humanity gives the event an even larger resonance. The Solar Fleet’s departure from Jupiter is presented to Earth through television as the appearance of two thousand suns, an image that inspires religious and triumphal responses. Much later, Luo Ji stands beside a gravitational-wave antenna whose kilometer-and-a-half-long mirrored cylinder recalls the Three Body world, Sophons, and the Droplet. These later forms of cosmic communication make the first spell transmission part of a continuing transformation in which humanity’s survival depends on the ability to send, conceal, interpret, and weaponize signs across astronomical distances.

The transmission also explains why Luo Ji’s authority repeatedly becomes a matter of public belief. The Wallfacer Project is eventually revived, and he is named its sole Wallfacer, while the Asian Fleet, European Fleet, and North American Fleet recognize the restored Wallfacer Act. His power is not simply military command. It is the power to maintain an inscrutable plan whose consequences others cannot see. The spell’s effectiveness depends on that distance between intention and verification, just as the broader deterrent depends on the possibility that a hidden threat is real.

At the end of the larger arc, the cosmic forest is not treated as permanently conquered. Luo Ji imagines a future in which brilliant sunlight might illuminate the dark forest, but the image remains a goal worth taking risks for rather than an accomplished condition. First spell transmission stands at the opposite pole from that hope: it is a message sent into darkness that protects humanity by making another location vulnerable. Its decisive achievement is not the destruction of 187J3X1, which remains delayed and uncertain, but the demonstration that information itself can become an existential weapon.