Strange Sea 2

Strange Sea 2 is the second volume of the "Strange Sea" series by She Congge (real name Xu Yufeng), published by Lujiang Publishing House in March 2013. The story follows the previous volume: in the 1980s, a soldier named Wu, decorated for his service, receives a mysterious assignment from the state and, under the alias Cao Cang, joins a Sino-American physics experiment whose aim is precisely to attempt entry into another space—the eerie "Strange Sea." Once the experiment begins, accidents follow one after another, and the Soviet Union also dispatches a nuclear submarine to shadow the joint expedition into the Strange Sea. Facing the same unfamiliar sea, the scientific teams of China, the United States, and the Soviet Union must choose cooperation, yet each harbors its own designs, secretly seeking the greatest advantage for its own country. Just as they gradually build friendships and prepare to complete the experiment together, they discover that someone has already gone ahead in the Strange Sea: the Doomsday Dawn Plan, the Noah's Ark Plan, the Lop Nur experiment, the disappearance of Peng Jiamu, the relationship between the legend of Atlantis and parallel worlds, and the mystery of humanity's true "ancestors"—one enigma after another surfaces. It turns out that the real key to the experiment's success is returning from the Strange Sea to the real world, yet the personnel who entered first decide to stay, unwilling to hand the Strange Sea back to the real world. Cao Cang must choose between loyalty to the continuation of human civilization and loyalty to his own country. The book has eleven chapters, weaving the Cold War order, historical unsolved cases, and the imagination of an oceanic alternate dimension together, and in the ending it resolves the series' main suspense.