bigabreads Chapter 277 The Light of Iapetus
Chapter 277 The Light of Iapetus
one year later.
The Webweaver descended slowly through Titan's dense atmosphere. Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, twice as dense as Earth's. The Webweaver passed through the orange atmosphere at a speed of less than ten meters per second. Its outer heat shield soared to 200 degrees Celsius in the minute it entered the atmosphere before slowly cooling down.
Titan's surface emerges at an altitude of approximately three thousand meters. Beneath the orange sky, methane lakes reflect the light of Saturn's rings like an elongated, gilded mirror. The sun here is merely a slightly smaller patch than on Earth, but the reflected light from Saturn's rings is enough to illuminate the entire surface, adding a faint golden hue to the orange atmosphere. Between the lakes flow black rivers, liquid ethane flowing slowly in an environment of -180 degrees Celsius. The riverbanks are not soil, but a mixture of water ice and organic matter, ranging in color from light brown to dark gray, like a frozen abstract painting. In the distance lies a low hill covered in methane frost, its white surface revealing the original dark gray of the rock. A thin line can be faintly seen on the summit, not a naturally formed crack, but a regularly arranged vertical line.
The net weaver adjusted his descent trajectory. The destination was the top of the hill.
After landing, the robotic arm extended first and gently scraped across the frost layer. The frost crumbled like a thin layer of ice, revealing a complete array of engravings underneath. The array was arranged with the exact same symbol system as the entrance to the Taklamakan Caves, but on a larger scale. The entire rock surface was densely covered with linear script, stretching from the mountaintop to the halfway point, like a complete wall that had been moved onto Titan.
Titan nodes don't store holographic data like Martian cubes. Titan is a routing table for a web, recording all the optimal communication paths between 177 node planets. It's like a switch for an interstellar network, installed here four billion years ago, waiting for someone to open it someday.
Zuo Cheng sat in the control center in Hangzhou, his consciousness bridge running continuously. The Titan image on the screen had a delay of over thirty minutes, but the consciousness bridge remained unchanged. The moment the Webweaver's robotic arm touched the etched surface, Zuo Cheng felt a very light sensation on his left fingertip. Cold. Not just cold according to data; his fingertip actually felt a chill.
Yu Ying noticed his hand twitch slightly. "What's wrong?"
"Ice," Zuo Cheng said. "I touched ice that was minus 180 degrees Celsius."
The system panel popped up the instant the Bridge of Consciousness made contact with the inscription. The Webweaver automatically activated the Webweaving Protocol Processor, sending a handshake signal to the Titan Node using the Founder's code. The signal traversed four billion years of silence, arriving at a machine that had never been activated before.
The node responded within 0.3 seconds.
Titan's surface trembled slightly. It wasn't an earthquake; rather, the quantum memory within the node activated from dormancy, and the relay antenna, buried deep within the mountain, began to rotate slightly. The frost that had accumulated on the antenna for four billion years was shaken off in an instant. The antenna locked onto its direction. Not towards Saturn, not towards the Sun. It was towards the center of the Milky Way.
System panel updated synchronously. Webweaver, 6/9. Titan Station active, functioning as interplanetary routing switch.
The Web-based linkage protocol is triggered within the same frame. When more than five nodes are active, a collaborative network is automatically formed among all active nodes. The Blue Star core, Mars dual relays, Jupiter sentinels, and Titan switches—six nodes confirm each other's existence within seconds, establishing a permanent communication link. This is not a man-made interplanetary network in the celestial sphere, but a native connection of the Web itself. It boasts zero latency, unlimited bandwidth, and covers the entire solar system.
Zuo Cheng saw the routing table in his consciousness bridge. It wasn't text, nor numbers. It was a three-dimensional dynamic star map, with glowing lines marking the delay and energy consumption of each communication path. The optimal path started from the solar system, passed through seven interstellar relays, traversed the dark region between the Orion and Perseus arms, and arrived at an ultra-high-density cluster of nodes towards the center of the Milky Way. That cluster of nodes consisted of about forty planets, densely distributed near the roots of the spiral arms, the communication threads between them like a spiderweb twisted into a ball. The communication density far exceeded the rest of the web. It was like an interstellar information hub that had been running at full speed for billions of years. Zuo Cheng touched the cluster in his consciousness, and a label popped up. Only one word: Home Port.
At the same instant, the Kuiper Probe returned. The moment Titan activated, the joint relay signal from the six nodes, like a pulse covering the entire solar system, passed through the first node of the Kuiper Belt—the asteroid located at the edge of the solar system, estimated to have only 34% of its energy remaining. For the past year, Zuo Cheng had touched it every few days with his consciousness probe, each time without response. It was like knocking on a door that knew someone was behind it, but that person never spoke. But tonight, as he felt the chill of Titan's icy surface within the Weaver's reality, the system displayed a second line of text.
Master of the Web, 7/9. Kuiper 1 node activated. Node function: Deep space navigation reference station.
Two things happened simultaneously. The Web Weaver touched the surface of Titan's node, and a thought traveled four billion kilometers to the edge of the solar system. June 9th and July 9th were less than a minute apart. From the five-year countdown to the first landing on Mars, from the three thousand days of waiting to the Sub-Ice Sentinel, from Option C to the four-hundred-ton Pioneer, from the three conditions to the tenth branch. All the waiting and preparation was released simultaneously today.
Yu Ying simultaneously projected the two lines of numbers from the panel onto the large screen. Titan Station, active. Kuiper Node 1, active. "5/9 has become 7/9. Two more needed."
"And the home port isn't on the edge of the map." Zuo Cheng zoomed in on the high-density cluster at the end of the routing table, projecting it onto the entire wall. "At the center of the Milky Way."
The conference room fell silent for a long time. During this brief lull, satellites streaked across the sky outside the window, as bright as ever. The Web Weaver was slowly deploying its second set of sensors atop a hill on Titan, preparing to read the complete routing data. Kuiper 1 was recalibrating its deep-space navigation antenna at the edge of the solar system, preparing to guide humanity for the next few decades.
Yu Ying stared at the words "home port" for a long time. "We previously thought the founders' home planet was on the edge of the Perseus Arm. But the routing table says it's at the center of the Milky Way. That place 31,000 years away might just be an outpost."
"Then their real home might be tens of thousands of light-years away," Zuo Cheng said.
"Option C involves more than just leaving the solar system." Yu Ying's voice was soft, but the control center was so quiet that everyone heard her. "Option C is about reaching that home port. It might take generations, it might take thousands of years. But the path has been lying in the solar system for four billion years. Today, we see its name for the first time."
Zuo Cheng connected his consciousness bridge with the Web Weaver for the last time. In the orange sky above Titan, Saturn's rings were shifting, appearing from the hilltop like a giant halo slowly traversing the horizon. The Web Weaver used its robotic arm to scan the inscriptions on the rock inch by inch, translating the routing table from four billion years ago line by line into Chinese, transmitting it from Titan to Hangzhou. The delay wasn't thirty-three minutes. It was zero. A small patch of methane frost surrounding the Web Weaver melted during the scan, melting into a few droplets that slowly drifted down in Titan's weak gravity, refreezing into tiny ice particles that shimmered faintly under the orange sky. He suddenly remembered that the layer of ice he had felt with his fingertips earlier had the same composition: methane, ethane, water ice, and unidentifiable organic deposits. A communication hub that had slumbered for four billion years, its surface covered in frost. He was the first to melt it.
His fingertips still held the warmth of that ice. It was cold, but not an unfamiliar cold. It was like touching something you'd been waiting for a long time, long enough that its temperature no longer mattered. What mattered was that it was there. It had always been there.