Chapter 48 — Satellite Warning
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Gao Yang focused all his attention on that image only he could see, and finally confirmed that what it displayed was indeed the terrain centered on the current Cecil Territory and extending roughly a hundred kilometers in every direction. Moreover, the familiar controls for adjusting the viewing distance had stopped working.
The image was confined to this range; it could neither be panned nor zoomed.
And what had once been a high-definition satellite view had degraded into this blurry mess overlaid with bizarre patches of color.
What did those colors mean? Thermal imaging? Or some other kind of sensory imaging?
Or... simply a malfunction?
Gao Yang clearly remembered the voice he had heard when he dropped out of the high-altitude view. He had distinctly made out words like energy failure, host restart failure, and escape protocol, so the possibility of a malfunction was extremely high. Combined with this present inability to adjust the viewing distance, his suspicion only deepened.
And he began to extend his reasoning: his soul—or rather his spiritual form—had most likely undergone mutation. Though he had come down to the ground and acquired a human body, his spirit evidently still retained the ability to establish a connection with some "thing" up in the sky. For the past few months he had been offline, but the crystal he had chanced upon had strengthened him and re-established that link. As for that ancient device in the sky, whether satellite or space station, it was still in a state of malfunction even now—yet whether from the energy system's last flicker of life or a successful host restart, it had somehow clung to existence and was still running to this day. The surveillance feed had turned into an indescribable blob, but at least that proved it still existed.
And in the course of this extended reasoning, Gao Yang could not help worrying about another matter: if the connection between his spirit and that "satellite" in the sky was closer than he imagined—if it was even something like a symbiotic bond, where one's death meant the other's—then once that thing up there truly kicked the bucket for good, wouldn't that be disastrously fatal?
He knew the likelihood was low. After all, he had completed his rebirth on the basis of Gao Yang Cecil's body, and he had distinctly heard the words "escape protocol" back then, so his spirit ought to have become independent already. But where questions of life and death were concerned, not even the smallest hidden risk could be overlooked!
Yet that thing in the sky was most likely hanging in this planet's synchronous orbit, while he himself was now trapped in an ignorant, backward medieval kingdom. Never mind repairing that "satellite"—he could not even see it!
Amid these churning thoughts, Gao Yang continued to observe every detail of the bird's-eye view. He noticed the image was not static; in fact those hazy color patches were constantly undergoing subtle changes. Some regions would brighten a little while others slowly dimmed, cycling back and forth as if according to some pattern—yet as they changed, the overall distribution and outlines remained roughly constant.
And just as Gao Yang was trying to sum up the pattern behind those shifting images, something changed again.
He suddenly saw a box like a floating window emerge at the top of the image, and within the box a line of text popped up, flickering continuously as though subject to interference—characters he did not recognize at all, neither Chinese nor any script of any kingdom or race on the Loren Continent.
But as he stared at that line in astonishment and earnest attention, the meaning of the text was directly translated and surfaced in his mind:
"New data. Giant planet activity increased. Alert level raised to four."