Crisis Before Hibernation
After becoming a Wallfacer, though Luo Ji appeared to be living a leisurely lakeside life, he was actually in tremendous danger. The Trisolaran civilization continued assassination operations against him through the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. In one carefully planned poisoning attempt, Luo Ji was infected with a lethal virus, his life hanging in the balance. Though he was ultimately rescued, the experience made everyone realize that the Wallfacers — especially Luo Ji, who was specifically targeted by the Trisolaran civilization — faced continuous mortal threats.
To protect Luo Ji's family from being implicated, the United Nations made a cruel but necessary decision: sending Zhuang Yan and their daughter to a secure secret location, completely severing their contact with Luo Ji. For Luo Ji, losing his family was more painful than facing death threats. Zhuang Yan and his daughter were the only warmth and motivation in his cold Wallfacer existence, and losing them plunged him into deep loneliness and confusion.
Meanwhile, the Wallfacer Project's overall progress was faltering. The other three Wallfacers' plans were successively exposed or failed, and public confidence in the project steadily declined. Although Luo Ji had internally begun deriving the rudimentary form of the Dark Forest principle, he had not yet found a way to transform this theory into a practical strategic weapon. He needed time, needed to wait for the right moment.
Entering Hibernation
After comprehensive consideration of various factors, Luo Ji decided to enter hibernation. Hibernation technology had matured by the early Crisis Era, capable of safely cryopreserving the human body for hundreds of years. Luo Ji's choice of hibernation involved multiple considerations: first, he needed to wait for human technology to develop sufficiently to support his strategy — with the technology available at the time, effective deterrence against the Trisolaran civilization could not be established; second, hibernation could temporarily remove him from the threat of assassination; finally, he hoped to reunite with Zhuang Yan and his daughter someday in the future.
Luo Ji's hibernation lasted nearly two hundred years. During these long centuries, human society underwent revolutionary transformation. Humanity entered a golden age of the space era, constructing thousands of stellar-class warships organized into three major space military forces: the Asian Fleet, European Fleet, and North American Fleet. The maturation of controlled nuclear fusion technology provided humanity with virtually unlimited energy. Space cities rose from the void as millions of humans relocated to space. Human society brimmed with confidence, even developing a social mentality later generations called "post-Trough blind optimism" — most people believed humanity's technology had advanced to a level capable of directly contending with the Trisolaran civilization.
A New World Upon Awakening
When Luo Ji awoke, the world before him was staggering. Two centuries of technological progress had elevated human civilization to heights he could never have imagined. Underground cities and space cities replaced traditional surface habitation, information technology had permeated every corner of life, and humanity's lifestyle, social structure, and values had undergone fundamental transformation.
Yet what most unsettled Luo Ji was the optimism pervading the entire society. Humanity was full of confidence in its space fleet, believing that over two thousand stellar-class warships equipped with advanced weapons systems were sufficient to defeat the Trisolaran civilization's advance forces. "Bugs" — the derogatory term the Trisolaran civilization used for humans during sophon surveillance — seemed no longer applicable to this powerful new human civilization.
Luo Ji clearly understood how dangerous this optimism was. Fundamental physics remained locked down by sophons, and all of humanity's technological progress was built on theoretical frameworks that had existed two hundred years prior. Although engineering application levels had dramatically improved, at the most fundamental level, the technological gap between humanity and the Trisolaran civilization had not substantially narrowed. More critically, humanity remained completely ignorant of the universe's true rules — the Dark Forest principle. They did not know that every civilization in the universe that exposed its location faced the risk of annihilation, did not know that what the Trisolaran civilization truly feared was not humanity's fleet, but the possibility that humans might broadcast the Trisolaran system's coordinates to the universe.
The Forgotten Wallfacer
When Luo Ji awoke, the Wallfacer Project had been nearly forgotten in public memory. Two hundred years was enough time to blur all historical events. The first three Wallfacers' failures had become dusty chapters in history textbooks, and Luo Ji — a Wallfacer who had slept through nearly two centuries of hibernation — was merely an outdated symbol to the people of the new era.
Luo Ji found himself in an extremely awkward position: he possessed the special status and theoretical authority of a Wallfacer, but in this confidence-swollen new world, no one truly took him seriously. He knew of the Dark Forest principle's existence, knew that humanity's blind optimism would be shattered by cruel reality in the not-too-distant future, but he could not openly speak any of this — because sophons monitored every word.
The greatest challenge Luo Ji faced after awakening was not a technical problem, not a resource problem, but how to complete his ultimate mission as a Wallfacer in a world that no longer needed Wallfacers. This mission was ultimately accomplished only after the catastrophic defeat of the Doomsday Battle — when all of humanity's pride was ground to dust before the Droplet, Luo Ji finally found the moment to transform the Dark Forest principle into a strategic weapon.