The distance between the vessel and Cang continued to shrink. The way he moved through space differed from how he had moved before entering that region—he no longer needed the vessel's propulsion system to displace himself through space. After returning from the boundary layer to normal space, his very existence had gained the ability to move through space directly under the power of his origin. Throughout the movement, he maintained the same posture he had held when emerging from that region. He neither accelerated nor decelerated, approaching the vessel's coordinates at a constant speed.
Zhi Li saw the approaching figure through the vessel's forward viewing window. She rose from the main console, her hands sliding from the panel to her sides as she stood. Her fingertips brushed past the edges of a row of standby indicator lights along the panel's edge. Once upright, she did not move, turn, or speak. She merely stood between the control console and the viewing window, facing the direction from which he was approaching through the stars.
Light detected the signal characteristics of the approaching presence at the sensing panel. The frequency of that signal precisely matched the stable signal she had received before Cang entered the spacetime disturbance, while its encoded header fully corresponded to the data format of the final set of directed sensing pulses he had sent. After confirming those two matches, she rose from the panel and stood between it and the center of the main cabin, facing the same direction as Zhi Li.
Shisui walked from his duty station to the front of the main cabin's central passageway, his gaze passing through the forward viewing window to rest on the approaching silhouette. The instant his gaze touched it, his ocular technique automatically ran a rapid existence-status confirmation scan at medium