CNSA Superman

Ron felt only that the endless white buzzing had vanished. His eyes were dry, and a sweet, bloody taste filled his throat.

He had no idea how much time had passed.

A few emergency lights came back on, illuminating the deathly pale cabin. Ron felt bitterly cold. He exhaled, and his breath immediately condensed into a thick cloud of white mist.

It took the lunar-orbit engineer quite a while to remember where he was.

Inside the Orion command module, on a trans-lunar trajectory, carrying out a lunar landing mission.

Cold. So cold.

Had the spacecraft's temperature control system failed too?

Heat dissipated extremely efficiently in space. How long had it been for the cabin to freeze like this?

The snow that had filled his vision seemed to have vanished. Was the geomagnetic storm over?

He turned his head with difficulty.

The cabin was a wreck. In zero gravity, all kinds of unsecured equipment drifted about chaotically. Jim, the navigator, lay curled up unconscious in a corner, while Allen slumped in his seat with his eyes shut. The commander remained anchored in place, working on something at the console.

He had woken up long before.

"Awake? Go wake those two," Robert ordered.

Ron clambered over using both hands and feet and shook them awake one at a time.

Soon, the other two gradually came around, but none of the four were in good shape. Large patches of bruising covered their skin. The radiation had already damaged their capillary walls, and they all felt an intense burning pain.

The low temperature in the cabin actually eased their suffering.

Almost all four showed obvious signs of high fever and clouded consciousness. Robert alone was holding his mental fog at bay through sheer willpower. The others had clearly entered the third stage of acute radiation syndrome. Before long, they would reach the terminal stage of multiple organ failure.

They had less than three hours to live.

Yet Commander Robert ignored his physical agony and repeatedly tried to reboot the Orion spacecraft's control terminal. He had been at it for nearly an hour.

Finally, he gave up in despair.

It was utterly useless. The spacecraft was now an iron coffin. None of the reboot commands would execute.

"What happened to that membrane of light?" Allen asked in a parched voice after waking.

"It vanished ages ago," Robert's voice came from the corner. "I held out longer than you did. Not long after the membrane disappeared, the geomagnetic storm ended too. The whole storm lasted only half an hour."

Half an hour?

A geomagnetic storm had three phases: initial, main, and recovery. The truly dangerous part was the main phase. During the initial and recovery phases, the magnetic field only changed gradually, and the radiation hazard was far lower than during the main phase.

Normally, the main phase of a powerful G5 geomagnetic storm lasted four to eight hours. A Carrington-class storm could exceed twelve hours, while the super-Carrington storm they had just encountered should have lasted at least twenty. Including the initial and recovery phases, its effects would have lasted a week.

But they seemed to have experienced neither an initial phase nor a recovery phase. It had begun with a violent main phase.

Now, that main phase had settled in an instant, like a basin of boiling water suddenly falling still.

"How could it have been so short?" Allen murmured.

No one answered him.

"How long has it been now?" Ron asked Robert, feeling his bodily functions deteriorate.

"Judging by the cabin temperature, the geomagnetic storm ended at least six hours ago."

"No wonder I feel so awful..." Allen groaned.

"I thought we were done for. Thank goodness it was only thirty minutes," Jim said with relief.

"We are done for," Ron said bluntly. "Forget thirty minutes. Even three minutes or thirty seconds would have been fatal. The hematopoietic stem cells in our bodies have stopped working. It just takes time for our bodies to collapse... Have you heard of Hisashi Ouchi? A Japanese man. In 1999, a Japanese nuclear fuel plant violated operating procedures, and he was exposed at close range to a lethal dose of seventeen sieverts. The DNA throughout his body was destroyed. He remained conscious as his organs and flesh broke down, until he died. I estimate we received over thirty sieverts. Each of us took at least twice the radiation dose Hisashi Ouchi did..."

"Thanks for the science lesson, European. Save your strength. Enough of that," Robert interrupted. "Since we're not dead yet, let's clear up one thing first."

"What?"

"Aren't you curious whether the person who saved us is still alive?"

Everyone instinctively looked toward the window.

There seemed to be nothing outside it, only an endless, deathly silent field of stars.

Whoosh!

Everyone suddenly heard a shrill rushing sound.

As they searched for its source, they noticed a brief flash outside. Then the window abruptly blazed with light, as though a vast surge of blue-green radiance were crashing against the Orion spacecraft, illuminating the entire cabin until it looked translucent as jade.

By the time they managed to focus their eyes, the surging radiance had become a gentle streak of blue-green light, coming to a steady stop just outside the window.

The light faded, revealing a figure standing with his hands behind his back.

"What the hell is that?!"

"Oh God..."

"What the hell?"

The instant that human-shaped silhouette appeared, assorted cries of "fuck" flew instinctively from the astronauts' mouths. But once they clearly saw the face illuminated by moonlight, their hearts clenched, and they could no longer say a word.

It was a young man's handsome face, with fine brows and clear eyes.

The young man floated up to the window, drew his arm back slightly, then slammed a fist forward.

Boom!

The tremendous impact was followed by a series of cracks as the window shattered. Before the four could react, air rushed outward under a full atmosphere of pressure. The violent airflow sucked every unsecured floating object out through the window. Even Allen, caught off guard, was swept backward several paces.

The figure swept his sleeve, and the window fragments and floating objects vanished.

He even blocked the escaping airflow, forcing it back inside.

The Orion spacecraft's conical command module had four windows in total. The main window was the largest, but even it was only a trapezoid measuring twenty-three centimeters across the bottom, thirteen across the top, and eleven in height.

It was almost impossible for a normal adult to squeeze through such a narrow window.

But all four saw clearly that the figure outside did not climb straight through. Instead, he turned back into a pale blue-green streak of Escape Light and easily passed through the shattered opening. Faint phantom bamboo leaves scattered in his wake. When the light and bamboo shadows faded, the young man was inside the Orion spacecraft.

His scorched shirt and trouser legs clung to his body, flapping fiercely in the wind tunnel.

Only when the four were nearly suffocating did he scatter a handful of broken glass. The fragments automatically assembled into a trapezoid, and then an ocher "Fixing Talisman" adhered to them.

The window formed from broken glass suddenly became extraordinarily solid, strong enough to withstand one atmosphere of pressure.

As for the light-refraction adjustment device between the layers of glass, he casually tossed it into his Storage Bag.

Every member of the Moon Landing Crew stared blankly at him, their faces purple from holding their breath.

Gao Jian waved a hand, and an enormous volume of northwesterly wind suddenly poured from his shirt cuff, instantly replenishing the cabin's depleted air. He had stored these winds in mountain forests during spring. They were rich in oxygen and pleasantly warm.

The four felt as though they were basking in a spring breeze and waking from a dream.

Gao Jian hovered before the window, then slowly descended and planted his feet firmly on the command module's floor, as though standing on ground with gravity.

In this completely weightless world, he walked toward them, step by step.

"Allow me to introduce myself. Gao Jian, observer for the China National Space Administration. This is my identification."

After speaking in English, Gao Jian took an identification badge from his pocket. Printed clearly on it were the words "CNSA Observer Gao Jian."

The badge glimmered with spiritual light, flew in a circle before the four men, then returned to his hand.

The astronauts stared at him in terror.

Gao Jian paid little attention to their frightened expressions. He merely looked around, inspecting the Orion spacecraft's interior. In truth, he was clearly not in good condition either, his eyes thoroughly bloodshot. But with his Foundation Establishment cultivation supporting him, he was in far better shape than the four astronauts.

He walked to the main console. When he discovered that it was completely unusable, unable even to issue a command to restart and ignite the SLS main engines, he could not help frowning.

The four watched Gao Jian move freely around the spacecraft, then looked at the shattered and restored window and the glowing talisman attached to it. They simply could not comprehend what they were seeing.

"May I ask what you just..." Robert had barely begun before Gao Jian interrupted him.

"Commander, can you still contact the ground?"

Robert hurriedly answered, his voice strained. "Sir, the geomagnetic storm completely destroyed the spacecraft's control systems. Even the most basic electrical circuits are down..."

At that, Gao Jian frowned and checked the instruments repeatedly.

Allen struggled upright, caught a water pouch floating in the air, and drifted over.

"Sir, have some water."

Gao Jian visibly paused. Looking at Allen's cracked lips, he pushed the pouch back.

"Thank you. You drink it. I'm not thirsty."

But Allen was so insistent that it was hard not to suspect he wanted to use the act of drinking to determine whether Gao Jian was human. Faced with such persistence, Gao Jian could only accept it and take a couple of sips of water.

Water from the United States was pretty sweet.

Too bad it was supplied exclusively to astronauts.

The entire command module was unusually quiet as everyone waited for Gao Jian to finish the water.

After drinking, Gao Jian happened to feel the spiritual power within him slowly replenishing itself. He was immensely grateful that it could recover automatically without absorbing spiritual energy, and his anxious heart eased a little.

Facing everyone, Gao Jian spoke.

"Everyone, I suppose you could call me something of a colleague. I'm glad I got to ride the SLS rocket with you, but our journey to the moon will most likely have to end here. You all know why. The entire rocket has become a dead rocket."

Gao Jian's expression dimmed. "We can't make it there."