The spacecraft continued advancing toward that boundary surface over the period that followed.
In the viewing window ahead, the surface had evolved from a vague outline into a distinct form visible to the naked eye. It was a dark membrane covering nearly the entire forward view, its hues unevenly distributed between blue-gray and deep purple—some regions cooler in tone, others warmer, as if the membrane's material thickness or stress state differed from place to place. As the spacecraft gradually approached, those differences emerged in finer resolution as continuous bands of texture extending from the center of the surface toward its edges, where they formed a gentle transitional boundary against the distant starlight.
Light's directed perception completed another high-precision scan during that time. The scan showed that the deviation angle between the spacecraft's current heading and the point of differing hardness on the boundary surface had narrowed to around one and a half degrees. At their current relative velocity, the spacecraft would reach the outer contact range of that point in several hours. At that time, the spatial gap between them would shrink into the range where the spacecraft's sensory systems could conduct active contact detection.
Zhi Li continued monitoring the movements of the signal sources behind them from the main console. The signal sources, which were reforming their encirclement from five directions, had formed an increasingly tight convergence pattern on Light's display—the sources from each direction gradually closed the distances between one another as they continued accelerating and turning, transforming their overall distribution from a scattered arc into a more concentrated ring. The offset between the ring's center and the spacecraft's current position remained at several light-minutes as the formation adjusted, as though it were gradually closing the radius between itself and the spacecraft as its center.
After observing the