Death's End is by far the darkest, longest and the most expansive(as expansive as any narrative can get) of three books and is a satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, but in its own terms. When you wrap your head around the scope of this cosmic saga and ruminate on it like the title says, the intricately engineered story line, where everything was seeded in with careful future consideration, feels all the more epic. 
 While the 3BP opened with Red revolution and Dark Forest with detailed scanning of Chinese alphabets, Death's End prefaced on a more familiar non eastern account - the fall of Constantinople. Story kicks in with the failure of Earth - Trisolaris deterrence under a new 'sword-holder' Cheng Xin, female rocket scientist, and humanity's efforts to evade annihilation in the Dark Forest universe. 'The Staircase project' is the first brain child out of this desperation, which sends a human brain for Trisolaris to intercept. Like the propagation mechanism of staircase project, readers are taken through the splintered timeline of Universe's history, via main protagonist's hibernation cycles, with divulged information and throwbacks to previous legacies. 
 I didn't have much patience after Liu's direct reference to Bester-'The Stars our Destination' project, and my initial taking a sip of the book got elevated into full course dinner. Destruction of 187J3X1 by Luo Ji's spell was reminiscent of Clarke's Star, the Twilight Zone version in Dark Forest and original interpretation in this instalment. The message in the bottle and unfolding of Universe from Garden of Eden state reminded me of Asimov's Last Question and Abbot's Flatland, though not directly referenced. Jovian space stations resembled Cooper Station of Interstellar or Rama in construction, and Liu traced it further towards Poe's Maelstrom. The beauty of Liu's writing was incorporation of all its Gordian knots into a comprehensive narrative, with an invitation to view them from both sides of the equation. The obvious setback of this centenarian account was neglect towards galactic humans or decision making of humanity or relationships where the previous instalments thrived. And though imparted with understandable metaphors and detailing, much of book's science felt like expositions. 
 For a book about higher dimensions, characters were a bit 2D. Unlike Ye Wenjie or Luo Ji, who propelled the plot, Cheng Xin felt like a badly written trope with a cardboard sidekick, whose sole existence was to provide a narrative perspective. But the pity I felt for Xin's mother like attitude to hang in and avoid risk probabilities, changed eventually after getting through the 'brand new universe, brand new life' concept. 
 I highly suggest a revisit on Tianming's fairy tales, once you are done with the book. Not only are they Hugo worthy in execution, but also enhance ones understanding on possible evasion strategies for humanity with black domain, curvature travel or using laws of physics as weapons. 
 I couldn't help but look back and wonder how perfectly titled the books in this were. In this retrospection, the title of trilogy feels all the more spectacular. Though the immediate response would be to attribute it with Cheng Xin's 'a past outside of time' epitaph, Liu has been remembering or paying homage to epochal moments of Earth's past as we know it, as well. The Great Ravine was a visible metaphor for Industrialization and Renaissance in general, Dark Forest deterrence stood for the nuclear stalemate and cold war history, Resettlement of humanity in Australia represented colonialism and genealogical migration. Sophones standing for Totalitarian regimes and welfare states, and the whole Trisolaran thing offering existential questions in Theocracy, were few other accounts where I suspected philosophical implications. 
 3BP and The Dark Forest were slow burners for me, which I savoured over considerable time, but Death's End hit me like a Trisolaran droplet. There was a part of me that wanted the darkness to be done with, and another part that couldn't put the book down due to the cliff-hangers and constantly mind blowing concepts. And, towards the end, I found myself more eager to interpret the light at the end of tunnel as a speeding train than rescue dawn, asking myself this question 
 "Is Nature really Natural?"