Phantom Realm (originally titled Phantom Realm of Gems) is the second installment in Zuo Wenping's "Young Yuanye Sci-Fi Adventure Series." The story begins in Rainbowfall City, where young Yuanye lives: one morning he wakes to find that nearly everyone in the city has vanished, leaving it a ghost town. In his panic he contacts Fei Lin, an astrophysicist and explorer away on business in Russia, who rushes back to join him in investigating the truth. The clues point to the five-colored light that appeared before the Cuikong Mountain incident; in a mountain rift the two find a strange empty eggshell and a parchment that reveals writing, bearing five grooves, only one of which still holds an emerald—as if guiding them to seek the other four gems scattered across the world: the opal of the Arctic ice sea, the "pigeon's blood" of Myanmar's mining region, the cat's-eye of Aisha Castle, and the black pearl of Tahiti's deep sea. Their pursuit of the gems spans polar ice seas, mining regions, old castles, and shipwreck graveyards, fraught with peril at every turn. In the end they discover that these five gems came from the space-time tree in the "Cosmic Forest," each carrying stable energy, dispersed by an accident; only by gathering all five can the distorted space-time be reset and Rainbowfall City return to its normal course. The book weaves gem, mineral, crystal, and geological knowledge into the rhythm of mystery and adventure, while portraying a boy's growth and sense of responsibility amid danger.
Founded in 1988 and affiliated with China CITIC Group, CITIC Press focuses on business and economics, social sciences, literature and children's books, with common categories covering social sciences, finance, literature, Eastern philosophy and literary appreciation. Its library holds 91 titles, including Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens trilogy, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Wu Xiaobo's Thirty Years of Strife: Chinese Enterprises 1978–2008, Nelly Sachs's The Weight of Butterflies: Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs, as well as New Interpretations of the Analects and Chiang Hsun's lectures on Dream of the Red Chamber. Its authors and translators include Lin Junhong, Ba Shusong, Chen Li and Chang Fen-ling. Overall, the press introduces influential works in finance and social sciences while balancing classic translation and local appreciation in literature and Eastern philosophy, combining academic depth with accessible reading.
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
