The spacecraft traveled through that outer starfield in silent mode for quite a long time.
Zhi Li's voyage log began on the fifteenth day after crossing the gravitational boundary. By the time they encountered the first Otsutsuki expeditionary squad, the log had accumulated a considerable number of pages. The spans of time between those pages were not measured in days, but in months. At the top of every page, Zhi Li recorded the spacecraft's internal timekeeping readings—a system that operated according to the Ninja World's standard hours and days. Yet beginning in the third month after crossing the gravitational boundary, she noticed a degree of discrepancy between the system's readings and her subjective perception of time passing. It was not a system malfunction. Rather, without external references such as sunrise and sunset, her biological rhythm was gradually drifting away from the standard timekeeper's beat. At the end of the third month's log, she added a note: Subjective perception of time differs from system timekeeping by approximately three percent. Adjustment in progress.
Light accumulated a vast amount of star map data before the sensory panel. After months of operating in silent mode, her panel was covered in a dense web formed by thousands of signal markers—covering every detectable signal source within roughly twelve light-hours outward from the spacecraft's current location, including moving, stationary, periodic, and sporadic types. During the prolonged silent voyage, she developed a new method for organizing the data. She divided signal markers into three categories based on their movement patterns: those with fixed trajectories were categorized as stationary bodies, those with changing trajectories as moving bodies, and those whose trajectories repeated according to predictable patterns as cyclical bodies. The three categories appeared in different colors on the panel, making the star map roughly twice as readable as it