Fishing for Yu Sheng

Two deep-space probes detached from the shuttle's external pod. The "Star Marker" engine released field fluctuations in the vacuum that could not be observed by conventional means, vanishing from their original location in an instant. The next second, they had already crossed this vast belt of stellar ruins and leaped into the faintly glowing excited gas cloud at the edge of the Morona Fault.

The probes would next pass through the gravitational fault and find a relatively safe "route."

Within the gravitational rift zone spanning several light-years, there might be hundreds or even thousands of such invisible routes. However, not all of these "passages" were stable enough for spacecraft to traverse. Some were only a few meters wide, while others lasted for mere seconds. According to the information Old Qiao had provided, the location where he had secretly traded with the Hermetic Society's contact lay inside a gravitational collapse point in the Morona Fault. Several stable rifts could pass through the gravitational fault and safely reach that collapse point.

Luo narrowed her eyes slightly. Under the distant starlight, she slowly "released" her consciousness.

The two deep-space probes were directly linked to her thoughts. The data returned by their sensors was precise and cold. The whispers of the stars and deep space had now become countless characters and charts jumping through her mind. Her electronic brain processed the information rapidly, then output coordinate parameters that the navigation computer could recognize.

...But it hadn't always been like this.

She had once been able to hear the "voices" of the stars directly—not precise, frigid data, but sounds like a gentle breeze or the pleasant tremor of crystal. Back then, the entire universe would whisper to her, and the stars would tell her, through their slow flickering, of the things the night sky had