The yellow rope gathered in a bit, and Wei Tianyang turned around to find Rovt grasping the red rope and slowly moving toward him. He changed his posture to be perpendicular to the hull, descending in just 2 minutes.
"Lie down." Rovt landed beside him, grabbing the cable around his waist.
Wei Tianyang also adjusted his body position, the magnetic force in his boots weakened, making him vertical to the outer wall of the space station.
"Perhaps on Earth, you’ve grown accustod to sunlight," Rovt said.
He paused, then continued, "But out here in space, that thing can kill you."
Wei Tianyang smiled and replied, "Sunlight can kill too?"
"High temperatures, radiation—it’s far more fierce than all of humanity’s weapons combined. It can make you feel warm and is essential for life on Earth, but trust , it’s not any source of life, it’s the ultimate judgnt," Rovt said.
"Ishmael, sunlight radiation isn’t filtered by the ozone layer in space. Your recent extensive exposure to it is a very dangerous thing," Li said.
"Your spacesuit needs to be sterilized soon; don’t touch it when you take it off," Rovt said.
Wei Tianyang didn’t speak. In that instant, he plunged into objective reality.
Rovt and Li disappeared, and the space station turned iron gray.
The universe shifted from a aningless black to a capricious deep red.
He stood up from the outer wall of the space station, holding the rope, and once more gazed intently at Earth.
At this mont, what he saw caused his pupils to contract violently.
The azure planet had now beco shriveled, a grayish-brown, a huge withered prune pit.
With the water stripped away, the Earth’s surface was wrinkled chitin, its shape no longer spherical, but a misshapen stone riddled with holes.
He looked toward the Sun. Unlike the star he had seen before, radiating intense light and heat, within objective reality, the Sun’s brilliance dimd considerably, like a lump of coal about to go out, with deep, red cracks crawling across a black sphere.
He rembered once seeing the Moon, drowned in the Milky Way, so he stopped looking at the dead Sun and turned to search for the Moon.
In objective reality, there was no flow of ti, everything was static.
Wei Tianyang walked along the outer wall of the space station for a while but couldn’t find any trace of the Moon, guessing it was on the other side of the Earth.
He reached the outer wall’s curve, nearing the section of the second chamber. There was a connecting rod below him which he could walk across to reach that section, but the yellow rope that previously connected Li and Rovt was now floating in the air. He took a slight step forward, but was pulled back by the red rope, unable to proceed.
Wei Tianyang pondered for a while and pressed a chanical button on his spacesuit’s waist, reeling the yellow rope onto his belt. Then, touching the hook, he faced a final internal struggle and unfastened the hook’s control.
Holding the hook and relying on the magnetic pull at the soles of his boots, he walked unprotected on the outer wall’s surface. Since there was no motion here, he didn’t have to worry about being flung out by any cosmic velocity.
However, if his feet were to slip, he could very well plumt down.
Wei Tianyang cautiously stepped onto the connecting rod, moving one careful step at a ti, safely reaching the other side of the outer wall. He quickly found a crevice and reinserted and secured the red hook.
After a sigh of relief, Wei Tianyang headed toward the solar panels. He wrapped the yellow rope around the frawork, then used the hook to lock it in place, forming a knot. Then, he carefully stepped onto the gloomy blue glass panels and walked toward the cantilever.
Behind the arc of Earth, a dense belt of red stars entered his view.
He couldn’t see clearly through the glass helt—perhaps the distance wasn’t close enough yet, and the obstruction from the solar panels forced him to move forward a bit more.
Wei Tianyang spent more than 20 minutes before he finally reached the end of the solar panels, which took longer than he had anticipated. Soon, he realized there was nowhere to hook his anchors.
The cantilever was too thick; he couldn’t secure the rope on it, and the surface was too narrow, certainly too slippery to stand on.
He stared at the edge of the solar panel for a long ti, then a particularly bold idea ca to him: in the cosmos, he could float — maybe he could "fly" up to the flat part at the end of the cantilever.
But before he did, he hesitated. Did he really need to go this far?
Wei Tianyang glanced at the ribbon of stars that barely peeked above the Earth’s horizon. He was eager to see the condition of the Moon.
Moreover, he finally rembered that he possessed a superpower...
He tried to feel the space station and discovered that the materials contained no pure iron. However, in the part with solar panels, two tal braces responded to him.
Doing so might damage the structure of the actual space station.
He thought about it and decided not to tamper with them. Instead, he took a pair of hooks from his equipnt — these were made of iron.
Wei Tianyang smiled.
He tossed the two hooks in front of him and then controlled them, using them to carry him toward the end of the cantilever.
And so, he took flight.
Holding the yellow and red ropes, he let the hooks fly in front of him, like leading two reindeer.
It took him just over a minute to fly to the southernmost end of the space station, where the last outer platform of the cantilever had just enough space for one person to stand, not actually designed for standing.
Now standing there, his view just over the horizon, Wei Tianyang saw the Moon he had always been intensely curious about.
Previously, he could only look up at this eerie celestial phenonon from the ground; now, it was within arm’s reach.
Wei Tianyang’s pupils divided into four, shining with a red glow as he tried to see clearly the Milky Way wrapping around the Moon. The sight before him was breathtaking.
That celestial body wasn’t a planet but seed to be a giant humanoid figure, huddled with its head buried in its knees.
And around it, the crimson Milky Way wasn’t made of stars, but countless tiny humanoid remains.
Excited and puzzled, Wei Tianyang strained his eyes to see the huddled figure — a petrified body. How massive must it have been alive?
And what were those circling around it?
Wei Tianyang rembered the scene of his first encounter with Baphot, that imnse creature, chased by many flies...
He couldn’t help but speculate that this giant being was possibly a Heavenly Falling Object and those stars its kin.
Such thoughts in mind, Wei Tianyang raised an even more terrifying conjecture in his mind.
He couldn’t resist taking another look at the current appearance of Earth.
With the sensory prompt from the "Moon," the Earth in his eyes no longer seed so simple as a planet...
The shrunken chitinous crust... the pockmarked surface, and those bits that seed nibbled away...
Sohow, Wei Tianyang couldn’t shake the feeling that the Earth was akin to a womb that had been bitten open, and the deceased Moon, as if it had been birthed from within...
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