Gao Jian focused almost all his attention on the EUS engines, huddling inside a nozzle and tinkering away, trying to bypass the engine's ignition sequence through physical means.
After several dozen minutes of exploration, he had almost succeeded.
He was the best rocket engineer.
It was just that the ignition circuit transmitted signals too fucking fast.
Electromagnetic waves traveled from the ground to the spacecraft at the speed of light, instantly triggering the RL-10 Engine's ignition sequence. Compared with electrical signals, a cultivator's thoughts crawled like a snail.
Almost a second later, the fuel valve Gao Jian was dismantling swung wide open without warning.
Once he reacted, Gao Jian kicked hard against the EUS casing and launched himself in the opposite direction, but it was already too late.
Four pale blue exhaust plumes burst from the nozzles at once.
One instant, the flames were only the size of fists. A fraction of a second later, they swelled into four blazing white pillars of light and blasted straight into Gao Jian's face.
A spiritual energy barrier activated automatically over his skin. Spiritual radiance and the exhaust's high-temperature plasma tore dazzling arcs around his body. Just as the barrier was about to collapse, a green phantom image of the Tortoise Shell Shield abruptly appeared before him.
But the Tortoise Shell Shield lasted only a moment before the low-grade magical artifact buckled and disintegrated under the tremendous energy impact.
For a Foundation Establishment cultivator who was already far from wealthy, this only made matters worse.
Still, that brief resistance from the Tortoise Shell Shield allowed the recoil to blast Gao Jian hundreds of meters away, narrowly sparing him from the exhaust's continued roasting.
Gao Jian tumbled through the vacuum at hundreds of revolutions per second. Spinning like a centrifuge, he lost every point of balance he could leverage, yet his Divine Sense remained forcibly locked onto the spacecraft's direction.
A hundred meters away, the spacecraft was accelerating away from him at a terrifying rate.
This was bad.
He had to reach the moon. He had to pursue Immortal Cultivation!
But he was about to spin himself dizzy.
As he tumbled, Gao Jian held his life-bound spirit sword across his body, pointing its edge against his rotation. He poured spiritual energy into the blade and slashed through empty space, the sword light blooming soundlessly in the vacuum.
Newton’s Third Law, recorded in the Great Dao manual The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, stated: "The action and reaction forces between two objects are always equal in magnitude and opposite in direction, act on two different objects, and lie along the same straight line."
Physics was the theoretical foundation of aerospace engineering, and Gao Jian wielded it with ease.
The sword light's reaction force abruptly reduced his spin from over twenty revolutions per second to two or three. One more slash finally stopped his rotation completely.
Sir Newton's cultivation manual had worked.
Then, with a silent roar, Gao Jian hurled his spirit sword away. A pale cyan thread of spiritual energy formed between its hilt and his palm, forcibly dragging him through the vacuum and accelerating him!
Within an extremely short time, Gao Jian reached an acceleration of five Gs.
Instead of growing, the distance to the spacecraft began to shrink.
Thank heavens he had been stationary relative to the rocket before, giving him an initial velocity of nearly 7,600 meters per second. That was the only reason he could catch the spacecraft during its translunar injection burn. If his velocity had been zero, he could never have caught a spacecraft already traveling at over 8,000 meters per second.
But this acceleration still wasn't enough.
The hurled spirit sword could provide only so much pulling force!
Gao Jian caught up with his sword and seized its hilt, pointing the blade backward while forming a Wind-Riding Art hand seal with his left hand.
There was no wind in a vacuum, so he would just take some out of his Storage Bag. The bag was empty anyway; he had plenty of wind to live on.
A fierce gust of fresh air roared into the vacuum. Spiritual energy surged from his dantian into every part of his body at a rate far beyond normal, and wind-riding patterns appeared. He briefly interrupted his Tortoise-Breathing Art and took a deep, forceful breath, compressing even the oxygen in his lungs into the process.
Then Gao Jian leaped off empty space and shot forward with a boom.
Along a straight line through low Earth orbit, successive sonic boom clouds burst into view.
Like a streak of cyan escape light slicing through the void, like a falling meteor, he chased the Orion spacecraft's wake, stamping out sonic boom clouds along the way.
Three hundred meters, two hundred meters, one hundred meters.
He'd caught up!
Gao Jian now noticed the activated onboard surveillance camera. Immediately realizing the risk of exposure, he cast the Invisibility Spell to evade its lens, then braked with a roll and settled neatly against the rocket's surface.
Gao Jian immediately clung to it.
He was finally safe.
Gripping a seam in the rocket's outer skin, Gao Jian drew out a clump of wind and wrapped it around his head, panting hard. Feeling the warmth conducted through the rocket's solid body, he could not help rejoicing at his narrow escape.
Alongside that joy came a profound exhaustion.
Sensing his depleted spiritual energy, Gao Jian closed his eyes and began regulating his breathing.
Whatever the case, one hour and fifty-eight minutes after launch, the TLI burn had finally begun.
According to Gao Jian's prediction, the TLI burn would last 315 seconds, increasing the spacecraft's speed from its current 7.8 km/s to 10.9 kilometers per second. At that speed, it would enter a 96-hour unpowered coast, officially beginning its long journey to the moon.
Throughout this time, Gao Jian could clearly feel that all four RL-10 Engines were burning steadily. There were no explosions or abnormal vibrations, nor any bizarre flameouts followed by restarts.
Compared with the chaos of the climb after liftoff, this Earth-to-moon acceleration phase could practically be called relaxing.
Eighteen minutes later.
The TLI burn ended flawlessly. The spacecraft's speed reached 10.92 km/s, the engines shut down automatically, and the spacecraft transitioned from powered acceleration to unpowered coasting.
Gao Jian finished regulating his breathing and opened his eyes. Now that he could leave the spacecraft and move freely, he decided to savor the thrill of "high-speed" flight through space.
Twenty li in a single breath.
As far as Gao Jian knew, only his sect's Martial Uncle Lang, who specialized in the Wave Cloud Art, could reach such a speed. Martial Uncle Lang was a mid-stage Nascent Soul patriarch renowned for escaping danger, with a record of surviving pursuit by a late-stage Nascent Soul great cultivator.
That suggested ordinary Nascent Soul patriarchs probably could not reach 10.92 km/s.
At least Gao Jian's early-stage Nascent Soul master could not. He had once watched his master visit the neighboring Moon-Hiding Peak, which lay more than twenty li from Azure Cloud Peak. Hidden in a bamboo grove, Gao Jian had seen it clearly: from his master taking off as a streak of escape light to that light landing on Moon-Hiding Peak, more than three breaths had passed.
By that calculation, his master's normal flight speed was around three thousand meters per second, or less than Mach ten.
Of course, that might have been because his master had not used an escape technique meant for fleeing for his life. He had only been dropping by the neighboring peak to cadge a little sweet wine.
If a late-stage Nascent Soul Unorthodox Cultivator chased him down, his master might well move faster.
Overall, the spacecraft's current speed already surpassed that of most ordinary Nascent Soul patriarchs. Only Nascent Soul cultivators skilled in escape techniques, or late-stage Nascent Soul great cultivators, could catch this moon-bound spacecraft.
Yet Gao Jian could fly at 10.92 km/s with merely Early Foundation Establishment cultivation. Ordinary cultivators would truly envy him.
Fast as it was, however, none of the reference points around him changed. There was not even a trace of wind, giving Gao Jian the illusion that he was stationary.
The stars had not shifted at all, the moon's disk had not grown a fraction, and even Earth behind him remained boundless, sharing the view equally with the cosmos.
After flying alone for a while, Gao Jian grew bored and went back to clinging to the rocket.
To be safe, he extended his Divine Sense into the rocket and swept through it from top to bottom.
Everything inside the spacecraft was normal. The four occupants had undone their launch restraints and were working through the translunar-phase checks in their mission manual.
Commander Robert reported the spacecraft's condition to Houston as though the earlier knocking, the booster that had nearly failed to separate, and the engines that had shaken for ages without igniting had never existed.
What composure.
The other three were much the same. Navigator Jim, lunar-orbit engineer Ron, and lunar landing specialist Allen were all busy with their respective duties.
Gao Jian considered prying open the command module's hatch and going inside to sit for a while, drink some tea, or have something to eat.
But considering the astronauts' mental state, he abandoned the idea.
Gao Jian began carefully reviewing the unreasonable aspects of this moon mission.
As he understood it, in a "normal" lunar mission, the rocket did not head straight for the moon after liftoff. Instead, it spent an hour orbiting Earth, swinging between a perigee of 162 kilometers and an apogee of 2,200 kilometers.
At the optimal point, the 162-kilometer perigee, it would perform the TLI burn and use a gravitational slingshot to begin its journey to the moon. That was the normal procedure.
But because Earth covered "half the universe," the orbital phase between 160 and 2,200 kilometers above Earth had become half a circuit at an altitude of 162 kilometers, followed by the TLI burn.
The entire process dispensed with gravitational slingshot acceleration and became a launch powered purely by brute force.
He kept feeling that he had overlooked something.
After a long while, Gao Jian jolted awake.
No.
Why hadn't the spacecraft slowed down?
Looking at the still-boundless Earth beneath him, he quickly realized there was a serious error.
The 96-hour translunar flight phase was calculated for a "spherical Earth." Neither the SLS spacecraft nor CNSA's Long March 10 Rocket flew toward the moon in a straight line.
In theory, the spacecraft followed an "Earth-Moon Hohmann Transfer Orbit," half of an enormously elongated ellipse around a "spherical Earth," proposed by Walter Hohmann as the most fuel-efficient route. Along this orbit, the spacecraft's actual travel distance slightly exceeded 380,000 kilometers, reaching 405,000 kilometers.
Moreover, after accelerating to 10.92 km/s, the rocket would still be continuously slowed by Earth's gravity. It would coast at a decreasing speed for over three hundred thousand kilometers. By the time it reached the Earth-Moon gravitational balance point, its speed would have fallen to between 0.6 and 0.7 km/s-a very slow pace.
Docking with the lunar-orbit module and making a soft landing in the lunar module all took place at such slow speeds.
Throughout the translunar phase, the spacecraft remained under the drag of Earth's gravity, undergoing "variable deceleration" with a continuously diminishing acceleration.
It was this sustained variable deceleration over 380,000 kilometers that produced a total journey time of 96 hours.
But Gao Jian had now clearly noticed that the spacecraft was still traveling at 10.92 km/s. Half an hour had passed without any slowdown, as though Earth beneath him exerted no gravity at all...
At this speed, flying straight toward the moon at a constant velocity, it would take only 9.8 hours to cover 384,400 kilometers, not 96 hours.
In the last half hour alone, the spacecraft had raced nearly twenty thousand kilometers. Its distance from the moon should have shrunk from 384,400 kilometers to 364,700 kilometers.
Could they arrive in another four or five double-hours?
Gao Jian looked up at the Taiyin Star, only to find that its apparent diameter had not changed noticeably.
According to the inverse relationship between apparent diameter and distance-the angular diameter formula θ ≈ D/(2L)-substituting the new observation distance after a reduction of 20,000 kilometers for L showed that the moon's apparent diameter should have increased by 6%.
A 6% change in size would be extremely hard for an ordinary person to notice. After all, even viewed from Earth, normal full moons could differ in apparent size by as much as 14%.
To Gao Jian, however, 6% was a very obvious increase. He was certain that the Taiyin Star's apparent diameter had absolutely not grown that much.
Gao Jian narrowed his eyes and estimated carefully. The Taiyin Star's apparent diameter had increased by only about 0.05% from its original size, a nearly imperceptible change. Without his divine sense, he probably could not have detected even that slight increase.
Working backward with a 0.05% increase and 20,000 kilometers in [the angular diameter formula θ ≈ D/(2L)] put the initial Earth-Moon distance at nearly four million kilometers-3.84 million kilometers, to be precise.
How was that possible?
At that distance, the only way for the moon's apparent diameter to remain unchanged was for its actual diameter to be ten times larger than expected!
That meant a lunar diameter of 34,760 kilometers, making it a gigantic celestial body far larger than a spherical Earth, whose diameter was 12,742 kilometers.
Beneath him lay a boundless Earth.
Above him hung a gigantic moon.
Had he actually transmigrated to Earth?
Where the hell had he been sent?
Gao Jian looked down at Earth again. The spacecraft had now traveled at 10.92 km/s for thirty minutes, covering roughly twenty thousand kilometers. In other words, the Earth before him should have been twenty thousand kilometers away.
For a normal spherical Earth viewed from twenty thousand kilometers away, the angular diameter formula gave an apparent diameter of about 36.8°. A full moon's apparent diameter was about 0.5°, so Earth should now have looked as wide as seventy-one full moons lined up side by side.
Gao Jian extended his arm. One fist spanned about 10°. A spherical Earth would therefore stretch roughly three and a half fists across, filling a large portion of his view. He would see at most about 40% of its spherical surface, unable to see a complete hemisphere at once, and the horizon's curvature would be very obvious.
In reality, however, Earth remained boundless, its curvature exceedingly slight, dividing the view equally with the cosmos. At the limits of his vision, the atmosphere obscured the horizon in a blur, leaving nothing visible.
Yet Gao Jian noticed that, using the continents as reference points, their outlines remained remarkably clear. He could even make out the shapes of cities. This looked nothing like an altitude of twenty thousand kilometers; two thousand kilometers seemed more plausible.
But the spacecraft had plainly traveled twenty thousand kilometers in the last half hour. How could it be only two thousand kilometers from Earth?
Countless thoughts collided wildly in Gao Jian's mind.
Two deductions lay before him.
The first hypothesis: the true Earth-Moon distance was 3.84 million kilometers, and the moon's diameter had expanded tenfold.
But this hypothesis had far too many flaws. The gravitational interaction between Earth and the moon alone was inconsistent. If the moon were that massive, hanging overhead would inevitably produce terrifying ocean tides. Every coastal city would be the first to suffer, and seawater could probably flood all the way to the Himalayas.
That hypothesis was difficult to sustain.
Then only one possibility remained.
Gao Jian swept his gaze across the slowly rotating outlines of the land below, and a vague suspicion rapidly took shape in his mind.
The spacecraft was unquestionably traveling at 10.92 km/s, but that was its resultant velocity, the vector sum of its motion-not its forward velocity toward the moon.
He quickly decomposed the velocity vector in his mind.
Its velocity could be divided into two mutually perpendicular components. One pointed straight toward the moon: its radial forward velocity. The other ran perpendicular to that moonward line: its lateral tangential velocity.
Together, they produced 10.92 km/s.
In other words, most of its velocity was not being used to reach the moon at all, but was instead being spent on endless lateral circling.
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