"[Purple Forbidden Enclosure] seemed to react just now... but then it vanished."
White-haired Ruan Zhou clutched a handful of counting rods as she half-crouched before the jade Goat Grand Star Disk, weighing every fraction of starlight. Her brow was furrowed deeply enough to crush a fly.
Of the Zodiac Grand Star Disks carried by the Square Heaven Traveling Vessel, only this one remained.
Without the support of the ancient Starry Sky, without the blessing of stars illuminating all heavens, relying solely on star diviners themselves to calculate the vast cosmos... the complex information of star paths and temporal currents, changing within a single thought, was indeed terribly taxing.
Ruan Zhou was not afraid of hardship. She had loved calculations since childhood. With the most basic counting rods, she built towers that ran through seas of stars and reached absolutely true results—the process absorbed her, and the results fulfilled her.
She merely... inexplicably wanted to speak.
Star signals did not lie. There was no such thing as "seemed."
She was working so hard to restore the Celestial Star Tower out of loyalty to Great Qi, to swiftly reestablish contact with Linzi.
But selfishly, she also hoped to soothe her father's worries as soon as possible—she knew very well how the solitary figure atop Linzi's Star-Gazing Tower gazed sorrowfully into the cosmos. That crushed Starweb jade had already carried all a father's concern.
She wanted to speak.
She wanted to discuss the stars, but naturally, there was no one beside her who could respond.
The Ziwei Star signals, which had long been intimately tied to Great Qi's imperial house, had abruptly appeared and then disappeared. It was hard not to feel uneasy.
Click-clack, click-clack.
The sound of counting beads striking one another joined into an unbroken string.
The surviving star officials of