Event Description
After the Staircase Program's payload was intercepted by the Trisolaran fleet, the Trisolaran civilization successfully revived Yun Tianming's brain and gave him a complete body. Having lived in the Trisolaran world for many years, Yun Tianming became one of the very few individuals who understood both civilizations. After the gravitational wave broadcast forced the Trisolaran fleet to change course and abandon the invasion of Earth, the Trisolaran civilization agreed to arrange a communication meeting between Yun Tianming and Cheng Xin before their withdrawal.
The meeting took place under strict sophon surveillance. Yun Tianming could not state any explicit technical information, or the communication would be immediately terminated. So he chose an ingenious strategy: telling three original fairy tales. These stories appeared to be absurd fables on the surface, but every plot element was carefully encoded with critical technical information about human survival.
The New Painter of the King hinted at the principles of curvature-drive lightspeed spacecraft; The Glutton Sea pointed toward methods of constructing a dark domain (light-speed barrier) using the "wake" left by curvature propulsion; and The Prince of the Deep Water contained implicit information about dimensional strikes and cosmic safety declarations. Had this information been fully understood and implemented, humanity could have built lightspeed ships to escape the solar system or established a dark domain to isolate the solar system from the universe.
However, decoding the stories proved extraordinarily difficult. Although Cheng Xin and the scientific community extracted partial information, they failed to fully decipher all the metaphors within the critical time window. The information Yun Tianming risked his life to transmit was ultimately only partially utilized, becoming one of the most regrettable missed opportunities in the Three-Body story.