The story, which began with the noisy night collapse of a residential tower designed by Ilya Sosnin that alarmed the townspeople, unexpectedly for him goes beyond the boundaries of the investigation of a local disaster, branches out, enlarges the scale of events, while turning into a purely personal story. Personal, however. not closed. After a detailed (childhood-adolescence-youth) acquaintance with Ilya Sosnin - vigilant and detached, obsessed with the otherworldly secrets of art and devious artistic hypotheses, dreams of finding a magic crystal - a novel story, formally fitting into a few days of one year, 1977, willfully spreads over the entire twentieth century and fantastically spans the turn of the millennium, reflecting the splendor and poverty of the “zero” years, as they were dubbed. A combination of circumstances, sometimes incredible to the ordinary eye, expands not only the spatio-temporal horizons of the narrative, but also the angle of view of the maturing hero, whimsically changing his needs and aspirations. Sosnin experiences strange cognitive impulses. At the turn of the era, literally on the ruins of Soviet power, he delves into the labyrinths of his fate, the destinies of people close to him and yesterday still distant from him, stubbornly searches for the internal motives of what happened to him, and, having experienced another shock, inadvertently takes a step on the other side of reality, beyond appearance shells; the future, previously floating in a pinkish fog, is inconsolably concretized, he gets the opportunity to look at his own past and the world around him with different eyes... How did he have to pay for the unexpected courage that turned long-standing creative dreams into bitter spiritual experience? And what was hidden behind the moving panorama of faces, ideas, paintings, architectural monuments, everyday trifles and elusive meanings? A multi-layered, densely populated novel promises the reader many surprises.