After slicing off the booster with a single stroke, Gao Jian was still shaken. The palm gripping his sword was slick with sweat.
Fortunately, the control commands from the ground were doing their job too.
Almost a second after the booster in zone B successfully separated, the flight director corrected the commands and adjusted the angles of the core-stage engines.
The main engines on the core stage slowly shifted their nozzles, quickly correcting the earlier deviation in attitude.
That took a great deal of pressure off Gao Jian.
He was relieved. Though faults kept cropping up in the rocket like mushrooms after rain, ground control remained steady and reliable. It also made Gao Jian realize that NASA, or rather, the ground control center, was not a monolithic bloc.
Most of them still wanted the rocket to reach the Moon safely.
By now, the SLS rocket was more than 49 kilometers above the ground, and atmospheric drag had dropped sharply. Only the core stage's four RS-25 liquid-hydrogen/liquid-oxygen engines remained at full thrust, with no solid boosters to provide additional propulsion.
The attitude deviations caused by the solid boosters separating one after another had also been straightened out through the combined efforts of Gao Jian and ground control.
"No one can stop me from Immortal Cultivation."
Gao Jian put away his Life-bound Spirit Sword, his gaze resolute.
He lay flat against the rocket's midsection, keeping his head raised toward the sky as it shifted from azure to deep blue, then gradually darkened toward black.
The rocket had shed its bulky launch configuration. With the solid boosters that had supplied enormous thrust from either side gone, its body looked considerably sleeker. Four scorching, pale-blue exhaust plumes streamed steadily from the central core stage.
The four astronauts were inside the rocket. Their Orion spacecraft was wrapped in the fairing's smooth curves, and they were still reeling from the booster's earlier failure to separate.
An ordinary person would already have begun regretting the decision.
I should have waited another two years for our own rocket to launch. At least the Long March 10 wouldn't have so many little faults. A rocket I helped design would be reassuring to use.
But Gao Jian was a firm believer in "I'm already here."
Since he was already here, he had to go up.
Over the next six hundred-odd seconds of continuous burning, the core-stage engines would steadily consume the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in the tanks. During that time, the rocket's total mass would drop while its total thrust remained unchanged, causing its g-load to keep rising.
But Gao Jian had once won a Foundation Establishment sword-flight championship. His Sword-Riding Drift and Serpentine Maneuver were honed to perfection. By this world's calculations, he had experienced loads of up to 20 g. This was nothing.
Under that tremendous acceleration, the astronauts in the command module had all lost the ability to communicate with the ground. They could only grit their teeth and endure.
Gao Jian also braced against the enormous g-load, remaining pressed to the rocket's surface, filled with boundless longing for the Taiyin Star.
At 193 seconds.
The fairing separation command arrived on schedule. The segmented fairing opened outward and, caught by the airflow, scattered like flowers strewn by a celestial maiden.
At 199 seconds.
The launch escape tower began to detach. The needle-like cone at the rocket's tip vanished, exposing a cylindrical top. The SLS Block 1B became a streamlined, brownish-yellow column.
Some fragments nearly struck Gao Jian, but he crawled around the rocket's surface and managed to dodge them.
The rest of the ascent went smoothly.
During the middle portion of the flight, the rocket's g-load gradually stabilized.
As core-stage engine cutoff approached, the tanks held less and less propellant, and the rocket grew lighter. With thrust unchanged, the g-load reached its upper limit just before the main engines shut down, peaking at 4.1 g.
By then, the rocket's maximum speed was approaching the astonishing first cosmic velocity. At 7,600 meters per second, it far exceeded the maximum flight speed of a Foundation Establishment cultivator. Even Golden Core cultivators would struggle to reach it. Only Nascent Soul patriarchs skilled in flight techniques could barely keep up.
With Gao Jian's current cultivation, flying that fast was utterly impossible.
Yet this sheer technological might excited him. Perhaps he really could fulfill his wild dream of ascending to the heavens?
Gao Jian's anticipation grew.
At 480 seconds.
The core-stage main engines exhausted their propellant and shut down on schedule according to their programmed sequence. Thrust vanished abruptly, and the four-g load pinning Gao Jian down dropped to zero within a fraction of a second.
The four pale-blue sets of Mach diamonds disappeared.
Gao Jian savored the brief stillness. The rocket had long since crossed the Kármán Line and reached an altitude of two hundred kilometers. He was truly in space now.
Finally, I can take a breather.
I envy those four idiots in the command module. If I hadn't been running around fixing everything, this rocket would have blown up several times over.
Freed from the crushing g-load, Gao Jian finally relaxed. Only then did something occur to him, and he slowly lowered his gaze.
An endless expanse of blue stretched into view below.
Gao Jian froze.
Where's the sphere?
The land did curve, but so slightly that he could make out no spherical shape at all. Beneath his feet lay the launch site at Kennedy Space Center. Farther away stretched vast seas, beyond which lay a deep expanse of continent: the Gulf of Mexico and the southern United States. His gaze passed over the American-Mexican peninsula and continued eastward, where he could see the Pacific Ocean stretching far into the distance.
At the far end of the Pacific Ocean, he could even faintly make out a whitish horizon. The world was too vast. He began to suspect that the dim gray line at the edge of his vision was none other than the coastline of the Chinese Mainland.
-But I'm above Florida, in the United States!
I can see China from the United States?
Granted, in his previous life he had firmly believed that the heavens were round and the earth square. But his soul had inhabited this world for a long time, and its scientific knowledge was deeply ingrained in him. Subconsciously, he had long since accepted the modern view of the universe.
Yet now, the land and the cosmos almost evenly divided his view. The farthest edge of the land he could see was nothing but a vast white boundary.
Isn't this simply heaven and earth?
Heaven and earth are clearly divided.
"What... is going on?"
An altitude of 160 kilometers lay within the thermosphere. He was not far enough away yet, so it was normal for Earth to fill most of his field of view. But its curvature should never have been this slight.
Countless pictures and videos of Earth flashed through his mind. Then he thought of the endless ancient-celebrity usernames in those crank-science spam emails. Aside from Wan Hu, there had been a user calling himself "Magellan," who had sent him a "flat-earth map."
Still bewildered, Gao Jian looked back down at the land beneath him.
A chilling sensation suddenly crept over him, for a simple reason: the outlines of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mexican peninsula did not match the map in his memory either. They only resembled them in broad terms.
Even the outline of the United States' Florida itself looked grotesque, with the absurd quality of a body whose head and feet had been swapped, whose arms and legs had traded places.
At that moment, Gao Jian could only curse how weak his Divine Sense was, unable to reach very far.
Deep-blue oceans and white clouds spread beneath his feet in interwoven layers, obscuring the distorted outlines of the land. Above was an ink-black void. The stars no longer twinkled, but seemed like cold nails driven firmly into his field of vision.
But he had no time to investigate that unsettling sight.
The core-stage separation bolts were about to detonate, and he had to move in advance. The lesson from the previous booster separation was still fresh in his mind. Gao Jian looked away from the ground. His Divine Sense had already locked onto the connections between the rocket and its core stage. After confirming that every bolt and separation mechanism was working normally, he lightly pushed off the core stage's outer skin with his toes and drifted silently upward.
Although the spacecraft was traveling at 7,800 meters per second, so was he. With no relative motion between them, all he needed was a gentle hop.
Two seconds later, the separation bolts detonated on schedule.
The enormous core stage slowly detached beneath Gao Jian's feet. The spent silver cylinder tipped downward like a corpse, firing its own small retro-thrusters to increase its distance from the main rocket.
It would fall back into the atmosphere along a parabolic trajectory and undergo a magnificent cremation over the South Pacific Ocean.
The upper stage's four RL-10 engines had yet to ignite, leaving the rocket temporarily coasting without thrust. Since its speed was still 200 meters per second short of first cosmic velocity, it could only follow an approximately circular path and could not remain at that altitude for long.
After confirming normal telemetry from the stage separation, the Houston Mission Control Center ordered the rocket to perform its orbital-insertion self-checks and deploy its solar arrays.
The solar arrays slowly unfolded before Gao Jian's eyes. At the same time, the spacecraft's life-support, communications, and navigation systems began comprehensive self-checks.
The four astronauts finally became busy, communicating with the ground in real time and reviewing the crisis they had just encountered.
But Gao Jian could not intercept electromagnetic waves, so he had no idea what they were saying.
Gao Jian tentatively moved away from the rocket. For the first time, the SLS in its current configuration appeared before him in full. With no fairing to obscure it, the white-and-brown body was completely exposed. Dark-blue wings formed by the solar arrays spread near the top, while the EUS upper stage's silver thermal coating gleamed in direct sunlight.
Human technology. A human creation.
In the empty cosmos, the sight of this rocket, forged by skilled workers from steel and propellant, gave Gao Jian a small sense of something tangible.
According to the lunar mission schedule, the upper-stage assembly-the EUS and Orion spacecraft-would travel halfway around Earth in fifty minutes at close to first cosmic velocity, then head for the Moon.
But now Gao Jian was intensely curious. The land beneath him seemed almost endless, as though laid out on a plane. How could they travel halfway around it?
He could only judge Earth's "curvature" by sight.
According to the horizon-distance formula, L = √[(R+h)²−R²], inserting his current altitude of two hundred kilometers gave a visible distance of 1,436.77 kilometers. That 1,436.77 km was the straight-line ground distance along the tangent to Earth's surface, or, under normal circumstances, the surface arc length from the farthest visible ground point to the point directly below him.
At the International Space Station's altitude of 390 kilometers, the visual range should have been around 2,263 kilometers.
But when Gao Jian imbued his eyes with a spiritual art, he could see a full 10,000 kilometers away. Beyond that, Earth and the cosmos blurred together, indistinguishable.
He could make out nothing clearly. All he sensed was a boundless gray-white expanse standing at the limit of his vision.
Gao Jian began carefully considering the flat-earth CG image "Magellan" had sent him. At first, he had thought it was merely a product of those cranks' imagination. Now he had to reconsider.
I should have talked to those people beforehand, Gao Jian lamented inwardly.
He narrowed his eyes at the farthest edge of the sky, trying to calculate it with the horizon formula.
"This makes no sense. Even Magellan's flat-earth map doesn't explain it. The land does have curvature. It isn't perfectly flat, but the curvature is far too slight. This is definitely not a sphere 12,000 kilometers in diameter. Judging by the curvature, even a diameter of 120,000 kilometers might be too small."
At that point in his calculations, Gao Jian was startled.
If Earth were a rocky planet 120,000 kilometers in diameter, it would have long since exceeded the Rogers Limit. Gravity would draw in a thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere, turning it into a gas planet like Jupiter.
"And when the senior engineers at CNSA designed the Long March 10, they used standard Earth orbits... If Earth is a sphere, then it's far too large. Orbiting it simply wouldn't work."
After turning it over in his mind, Gao Jian decided that an enormous sphere could not be the explanation. He had firsthand experience of gravity, and it was the standard 9.8 m/s². If gravity was normal, that meant the planet's total mass was normal too.
He thought it over again and again, then concluded that the problem might lie with his "eyes."
In his previous life, he had studied illusion formations extensively. He even suspected that anomalous folds in space existed near the Kármán Line, stretching the space of low Earth orbit laterally in one direction and flattening its vertical curvature, thereby distorting his vision.
If his naked eyes could not make sense of it, perhaps a camera would show things normally.
He took out his phone, only for its screen to barely light up for a few seconds. Several missed calls appeared before him. Then the vacuum caused the battery to swell and the phone to overheat, rendering it completely unusable.
Gao Jian scratched his head.
Surely this world can't really have round heavens and a square earth?
No, that doesn't add up. Long ago, while searching for spiritual veins, he had used visits home as an excuse to secretly roam mountain ranges around the world. Not only had he visited the Kunlun Mountains, he had even seen the Andes Mountains in South America, on the other side of Earth. He had flown more than a full circuit around the planet. Though he had found no spiritual veins, he had established early on that Earth joined back on itself and was approximately spherical.
Why did his experience on Earth contradict what his naked eyes observed?
It seemed he would have to get farther from the ground before he could understand this curvature problem. An altitude of 160 kilometers was still too low.
He refused to believe that, once he entered lunar orbit and was 300,000 kilometers from Earth, he would still be unable to make sense of it when he looked back.
Speaking of which, what are the astronauts doing? Haven't they noticed what's outside the windows?
Gao Jian swept his Divine Sense over them, only to discover that all four astronauts were methodically carrying out their various self-checks. None seemed to be paying attention to the view outside.
That only confused him further.
He could not resist flying over to a window, hoping to sneak a look inside. But none of the astronauts paid any attention to the movement outside.
Maintaining the hand seal for the Invisibility Spell, Gao Jian pressed right up against it.
Even his eyelashes nearly touched the glass.
But all he saw was a distorted, warped command module.
The window was actually made of special optical glass! It was like an oversized corrective lens. There was even a mechanical zoom mechanism inside the glass, ensuring that the window's refractive curvature could be adjusted in real time with the spacecraft's altitude.
Gao Jian stared blankly.
This window... is a curvature lens?
If Gao Jian's guess was right, the people inside looking out at Earth through the window would probably see a planet with normal curvature, 12,700 kilometers in diameter.
He could not resist tapping the window's outer pane. Although there was no air in a vacuum, sound could still travel through solids. He was certain the people inside would hear him.
Colonel Robert heard that familiar knocking again.
The four astronauts looked at one another.
Colonel Robert said, "Maybe some debris didn't come completely free during separation."
Lieutenant Colonel Jim said, "Do you believe that yourself?"
Colonel Robert said, "Do you insist on making me say it's haunted?"
Lieutenant Colonel Jim said, "...You know I used to be a military chaplain."
Robert spread his hands. "Then go investigate, brave chaplain. May God protect you."
Jim gave an awkward smile.
The other two astronauts were Ron, a European systems specialist, and Allen, a Canadian lunar astronaut. They had long since grown numb to it as well. The sound had started not long after launch and continued for several minutes. Now it had begun again.
Ron asked, "Should we keep reporting it to Houston?"
Robert glanced at him. "We've reported the strange noises to the ground more than a dozen times already. What good has it done? They can't find the cause either, and the noises have never gone away. Friends, let's just treat it as a fault in the spacecraft and stop digging."
Jim reassured them, "God will protect us."
Allen, the lunar astronaut, refused to accept anything supernatural. Following the sound, he drifted over to the window and looked out at the stars and the blue Earth below, its surface curving into a hemisphere. Without realizing it, he met the gaze of Gao Jian, who was maintaining his Invisibility Spell, at point-blank range.
"There's nothing outside. So where's that knocking coming from?" Allen sighed.
As NASA's carefully selected Moon Landing Crew, all four had made multiple journeys into space. Allen in particular had spent more than 1,200 hours aboard the International Space Station. But wherever or whenever they looked outside, the view through the windows was as dull and monotonous as ever.
Gao Jian did not speak or disturb them.
Judging by their reactions, these brave astronauts genuinely knew nothing. They had not noticed anything unnatural about the windows either.
But why would NASA do this?
From the very beginning, this lunar mission had been riddled with suspicious details. A conspiracy theory inevitably took shape in his mind: NASA had long known about the optical anomaly affecting Earth's curvature, but the declining United States, desperate to preserve its imperial hegemony, had recklessly buried its head in the sand. With its technology still immature, it had used the windows to deceive the astronauts and forced the lunar mission ahead.
He could not help looking up at that weighty, luminous Moon.
The legendary sacred land of immortals was there. The Taiyin Star was the last possible place Gao Jian could find to cultivate, but the distance of 380,000 kilometers filled this Foundation Establishment cultivator with despair.
With Foundation Establishment cultivation alone, he could fly his entire life and never reach it.
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