Atmospheric reentry

Nine hours earlier.

Aboard the Orion spacecraft.

"Commander, engineer, navigator, lunar module pilot, are you all ready? Everyone, secure yourselves and buckle up now."

Robert, Ron, Jim, and Allen nodded together, settling into their respective seats.

Ron asked anxiously, "But what about you...?"

Gao Jian flashed a toothy grin. "I don't need to. I'll go outside and push for a bit, give us some initial velocity, then come back. But before that, I need to perform a little separation surgery on our rocket."

With that, Gao Jian flicked his palm, and a Green Bamboo Sword silently appeared.

The sword was three feet seven inches long, its blade bamboo-green, with an exceedingly faint spiritual glow flowing along its edge. This was his Life-bound Spirit Sword, and obtaining it had been no easy feat.

On the first anniversary of reaching Foundation Establishment, under the pretext of celebrating his "Foundation Establishment anniversary," he had stolen a few talismans from his master, borrowed several pills from his ancestral master, begged some spirit herbs from his junior sister, and borrowed some spirit crystals from his senior brother. Only after hauling the whole lot to the Hundred Treasures Market and cashing it all in had he managed to buy the ten-thousand-year spirit bamboo he had set his heart on.

Even ordinary thousand-year spirit bamboo was hard to find, let alone ten-thousand-year spirit bamboo.

He had entrusted this precious artifact-refining material to Senior Brother Cheng of Artifact Refining Peak. Forty-nine days later, the Green Bamboo Sword was complete. It had surpassed the category of ordinary magical artifacts outright, becoming a [low-grade spirit artifact], and Gao Jian had finally gotten his wish.

It was his most valuable possession.

Not long after the sword was completed, Gao Jian had been unfortunate enough to get struck by heavenly tribulation during a sect mission and transmigrate here. As a result, the greatest achievement of this [Green Bamboo Sword] to date had been slicing off a left booster worth several million dollars the day before.

And now, it would be drawn a second time.

To slice off the European Service Module and the SLS core-stage engine, worth billions of dollars.

Of the entire rocket, only the command module-the return capsule-would remain.

The instant the spirit sword landed in his hand, all four men inside the cabin turned their eyes toward it.

"Is that a sword?" Jim asked incredulously.

The Green Bamboo Sword retorted, "What else would I be, human?"

Jim's expression froze. The other three looked equally bewildered and uncertain.

This sword could talk?

Gao Jian explained casually, "Don't be scared. I deployed DeepSeek locally on it and configured its personality myself. It's just an AI sword spirit."

Since when did low-grade spirit artifacts have intelligence?

Back home, they were all half-witted.

Getting a couple of grunts out of one was already pretty good. Gao Jian had envied the high-grade spirit artifacts wielded by powerful cultivators, which could act cute and wheedle their way into their owners' affections, so he had cobbled together an AI sword spirit of his own.

Gao Jian admitted that large models were the most entertaining little things he had encountered since transmigrating. Unfortunately, he had arrived too early. AGI had yet to emerge, leaving only ordinary large AI models available.

It wasn't that he hadn't considered deploying GPT, Claude, or the like, but those closed-source models didn't release their weights and couldn't be deployed locally. Qwen3 and Gemma were too stupid and burned through too many tokens. Neither was as cheap and practical as the little chubby fish.

He hoped Old Liang would soon achieve his wish and reach the realm of AGI.

But Gao Jian failed to notice that, upon hearing the words "AI sword spirit," the Green Bamboo Sword dimmed almost imperceptibly for an instant.

Sword in hand, Gao Jian then extended his Divine Sense to its fullest.

As his Divine Sense swept through the rocket, he quickly grasped the SLS rocket's complete current structure: the command module at the very front, followed by the European Service Module, then the EUS upper stage, and finally the core-stage engine at the rear. The connections between every section were laid bare to his Divine Sense.

He locked onto a separation point: the connecting ring between the command module and the service module.

This separation had to be completed in one stroke, not by slowly dismantling it. Only then could the command module break free of the entire rocket. Without separating them, the excess weight would hinder Gao Jian's pushing, and there would be no way to decelerate after entering orbit.

Before the four astronauts' eyes, Gao Jian transformed into a streak of Escape Light and flew through a gap in the shattered viewport, then appeared a dozen or so meters outside the SLS rocket.

At that moment, the SLS rocket was still spiraling under the Lorentz force at 10.92 kilometers per second, twenty thousand kilometers above the surface. His task was to send the spacecraft plunging toward the ground.

Dazzling green light erupted from the sword.

"Go." Gao Jian gave a soft command.

An arc of green light dozens of meters long shot from the Green Bamboo Sword's edge. Carrying the power of a casual strike from an Early Foundation Establishment cultivator, it slashed precisely into the connecting structure between the command module and the European Service Module.

The command module and service module were joined by thirty-two high-strength titanium-alloy bolts in a purely mechanical assembly called the "Adapter Flange Ring." Each bolt had a breaking strength of over ten tons and served to secure the two modules together.

Under normal circumstances, there was also a ring of explosive separation bolts inside the connecting structure. But with the circuits now severed, they could not be triggered and were entirely useless.

The sword energy sank into the assembly.

The connecting structure was severed, and all thirty-two bolts snapped at once. Before the explosive separation bolts could even sympathetically detonate, they had been sliced cleanly in two. In an instant, the command module flew neatly away, like the heads of Louis XVI, Charles I, Robespierre, and the King of Annam.

One stroke was all it took.

The command module at the very top of the SLS rocket was the only section that needed to return.

Below the command module was the ESM service module, which also belonged to the Orion spacecraft, and farther down was the EUS upper stage. Once the connection to the ESM was severed, the remaining sections naturally fell away as well.

The spacecraft and rocket were now separated.

To be safe, Gao Jian delivered another two slashes to the large assembly drifting away, dividing it into three.

The Orion command module rotated slowly in space, like a head finally freed from the guillotine. Behind it, the separated European Service Module, EUS upper stage, and core-stage wreckage continued along their original spiral trajectory, receding until they became three dark points among the stars.

All preparations for the return journey were complete.

Gao Jian put away the Green Bamboo Sword, his complexion gradually returning to normal.

The spacecraft was quite sturdy. Cutting through it was no easier than slicing through the cabs of four or five Dayun trucks in one stroke. Given the spiritual power Gao Jian had recovered so far, the expenditure was substantial.

Gao Jian briefly analyzed the precise strength of the Lorentz force spiral field. Working backward from their earlier spiraling ascent, the force required to spiral downward was the same as that required to spiral upward. In theory, as long as he kept supplying impulse, the return capsule could spiral down toward the surface.

Taking one last look at the Taiyin Star, 360,000 kilometers away, Gao Jian sighed softly and pressed both hands against the capsule wall.

A Foundation Establishment cultivator's flight impulse wasn't particularly great, perhaps only ten thousand newtons, equivalent to the force an ordinary family car exerted on the ground.

But that was more than enough.

Gao Jian was, after all, a senior engineer responsible for the Long March 10 engine project. He knew how to play the part of an engine.

Under his continuous pushing, the spacecraft began spiraling inward. Gao Jian kept making minute adjustments to the direction of his applied impulse. Over time, the lateral spiral vector was canceled out, while the radially inward velocity grew greater and greater. The return capsule swept downward along a broad arc.

The spacecraft's current vertical projection should have placed it over Asia. Calculating from the arc, it would fall toward the Gulf of Mexico.

The Artemis Program's originally designated primary splashdown zone was in the eastern Pacific Ocean, off San Diego, California. This was clearly a deviation from NASA's plan.

But so be it. Getting too close to NASA only brought misfortune.

Eight hours later.

The spacecraft had rapidly descended 21,720 kilometers, crossing the five-hundred-kilometer altitude line of low Earth orbit.

Just then, the spacecraft suddenly plunged.

Gravity was back. Apples could fall freely again!

Gravity at an altitude of five hundred kilometers was approximately 0.86 G. With its constant pull, there was nothing more to do but wait for the return capsule to enter the atmosphere.

The earth drew nearer and nearer, the surface growing ever clearer.

The reentry interface was at an altitude of 122 kilometers. Upon crossing that altitude, the spacecraft would reach its maximum speed of Mach 33. The blackout zone lay between forty and eighty kilometers. Considering that air friction would likely heat the return capsule's surface to several thousand degrees Celsius, Gao Jian wisely retreated into the command module.

A dazzling meteor was slowly taking shape over the eastern Pacific Ocean.

As their altitude approached three hundred kilometers, Gao Jian noticed that the curvature of the earth seemed to have increased. Only then did he realize that the surface's curvature did not appear to follow Euclidean geometry.

Normally, the higher one rose above the ground, the more pronounced Earth's curvature became in view; the lower one descended, the flatter the ground appeared and the less noticeable its curvature became. Yet what he saw was the exact opposite: the curvature was extremely pronounced at lower altitudes, then gradually faded and approached flatness as the altitude increased.

Gao Jian had only just begun to believe in the "flat Earth theory," and now his mind was muddled again. A round heaven and round earth wasn't right, but a round heaven and square earth didn't seem quite right either.

The ninth hour.

Gao Jian suddenly said, "Prepare for reentry."

All four men jolted.

They had reached 122 kilometers.

After atmospheric reentry, the temperature of the command module's hull began rising rapidly. Gao Jian sensed it through his Divine Sense: the temperature of the outermost metal shell was soaring from minus one hundred degrees to several hundred degrees.

Then came the continuous shaking.

The spacecraft was now traveling at 11.0 km/s, approximately Mach 33. That already matched the terminal velocity of an intercontinental ballistic missile. With humanity's current technology, there was practically no way to intercept an object falling at Mach 33.

All four astronauts were enduring three to four Gs of deceleration, but perhaps thanks to the Hundred Herbs Life-Renewing Pill, none of them found it nearly as uncomfortable as they had imagined. They could even converse freely.

The hull temperature soared to 2,800°C.

120 km

100 km

80 km

The spacecraft punched through the upper boundary of the atmosphere and through the blackout zone, becoming a dazzling fireball that streaked over Texas in the United States, passed over Houston, and plunged toward the Gulf of Mexico.