Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
The terminally ill engineer who bought a star for the woman he loved without telling her, then volunteered his own brain for the Staircase Program. Captured, kept, repurposed by Trisolarans, he smuggled humanity's only escape route home as three children's fairy tales.
Tianming is the patron saint of the unrequited and the underestimated. He says almost nothing, and what he says is undersold — a joke delivered into the carpet, a truth presented as an apology. He loves Cheng Xin without ever once trying to be loved back, and he spends his small inheritance on a star for her the way another man might leave flowers. As a Trisolaran captive he becomes patient and impossibly clever; he encodes the curvature drive, the safety notice, and the location of a black-domain refuge into stories about princesses and umbrellas because that is the only signal Sophon will not censor. He is the most romantic character in a series that has no time for romance, and he knows it, and he does it anyway.
Before the Staircase: thin to the point of frailness, with the gray pallor of stage-four lung cancer, hollow temples, a college boy's haircut grown out and unkempt. Soft brown eyes that look at Cheng Xin like she is weather. After his reconstruction by the Trisolarans, in his rare visions through Sophon's relay, he appears apparently young again, dressed in soft tunics, but with something quietly wrong in the way he holds his head — a body that has been rebuilt by people who learned anatomy from a textbook.
Also known as: Tianming, 云天明, Will Downing