The spacecraft traveled for a considerable length of time under full-thrust propulsion. The passage of time took on an entirely different texture in the starry sky than it had on a planet's surface—there were no sunrises or sunsets as reference points, no changing seasons as markers, no crops growing or leaves changing color to measure the length of cycles. The craft's internal time system ticked forward at a steady rate. Each day was exactly the same length as a standard day in the Ninja World, but as they accumulated continuously, those days gradually lost the tangible weight they had carried on a planet's surface. They became a string of evenly arranged numbers in the log, distinguished from one another only by increasing page numbers.
Zhi Li was the first to notice this change. She paused her pen on one page of the flight log and looked at the entries she had written consecutively over the previous period. There was almost no difference between them: each day's system inspection results differed from the previous day's only in the second decimal place, while each coordinate update differed only by fractions of a degree along the trajectory. She studied those records for a while, then flipped back through the log until she found the first entry from when they had crossed the gravitational boundary. She compared the sense of time she had felt while writing each page then with what she felt now. In the blank space on that page, she wrote a note: Subjective time flow is slowing. Not due to physiological causes, but cognitive drift caused by a lack of reference points. Recommend increasing the frequency of internal cycle markers. After writing that note, she installed a set of small jutsu markers along the main corridor wall. Each marker lit up