I live in the Martian wilderness!

Five minutes later.

"...Reporting to... Tianqiong..."

Xuanjian's repetitive electronic voice finally slowed down, and the electronic tearing sound gradually returned to a girl's voice.

The command center fell into a deathly silence.

Gu Yu suddenly lifted his head out of the water, gasping for breath. Water dripped down his cheeks.

"...Lieutenant Colonel?" Xuanjian's voice rang out again, regaining its usual composure, but tinged with confusion and bewilderment.

"Just now... my logic unit encountered an unexpected loop... I think I was... talking to myself?"

"You almost burned out both of our CPUs." Gu Yu looked up, wiping the ice water off his face. Although he was pale and dizzy, his eyes were surprisingly bright.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant Colonel, I..."

"It's alright, Xuan," Gu Yu interrupted. "Your reaction just now has proven everything. This information is no longer of importance!"

"It is a divine oracle powerful enough to change the fate of a nation, and even the very nature of our civilization!"

"That's right, Lieutenant Colonel! We must transmit it back to Earth immediately!" Xuan Jian's voice was filled with urgency. "This technology will accelerate Earth's technological civilization's development by at least 100 years!"

This time, it was Gu Yu's turn to calm down.

"Send it back? That's absurd. Do the math. The Zhurong satellite uses Tianwen-1's 14-minute daily window to send this 1.2TB compressed file back... how long would that take?"

Xuanjian's calculations instantly extinguished all excitement.

"Reporting, Colonel... Based on the theoretical maximum bandwidth (2Mbps) and a valid transmission time of 13 minutes... we need... 6154 successful communication windows..."

"It will take a total of... 23.2 years."

"23 years is too long." This feeling, colder than liquid nitrogen, made Gu Yu shake his head. "We can't count on this pathway anymore."

"The Fire Seed Team will arrive in 150 days. Qin Manying and her team's Long March 9 rocket, as a manned flagship, must be equipped with even higher-specification communication equipment, right?"

"Yes, Lieutenant Colonel." Xuan Jian immediately pulled up the configuration list of the Fire Seed Squad's spaceship, "Long March 9 manned version, equipped with a deep space laser communication array."

"Its theoretical bandwidth is hundreds of times that of the Zhurong X-band antenna, and the estimated total time for them to relay to Earth is approximately 10 hours."

A glimmer of hope rekindled in Gu Yu's eyes. Compared to 23 years, this was nothing. If he could just endure these 150 days, if he could reunite with the Fireseed Team…

However, a fear that he had deliberately suppressed in his heart burst forth like a wild beast breaking free of its cage.

He recalled those two unexpected Martian jumps.

For the first time, it was roughly dragged to Earth's side.

The second time, it was thrown back to this place 60 million kilometers away.

"Xuan... Mars... jumped twice without any warning."

"If... I mean if, during these 150 days of waiting for the Spark Squad, Mars jumps again..."

"What if next time, its destination isn't some corner of the solar system, but... beyond the Oort Cloud, or even... another star system..."

He didn't continue, but the scene depicted in his unfinished words made the air in the command cabin incredibly heavy.

That means that this technology from the "gods" will disappear from the sight of Earth's civilization along with him.

"If my waiting causes Earth to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity..." Gu Yu clenched his fist, unable to hold back his anger. "I... I will never be able to forgive myself!"

"No! Absolutely not! We have to find a way! We have to find a faster way! Because this is a silent war!"

"Mysterious! With our current resources, is it even possible to transmit even the most crucial information back to Earth in the shortest possible time?"

"No, Lieutenant Colonel. Based on our current energy and hardware, there is no physical possibility of completing terabyte-level data transmission in the short term. We can only turn to Earth for help."

"Seek help from Earth..." Gu Yu was pondering, but another, even more bizarre image surfaced in his mind—the green-eyed girl and the incredibly fast reply.

"No..." He immediately rejected his idea. "Every time we send a signal outward, it could be intercepted by that girl!"

"We were just tentatively asking the void a question, and we received a reply just ten minutes later! This means she might be monitoring this space in real time!"

"If we send a distress message to Earth now, there's a very high chance they'll intercept it first!"

"That's tantamount to exposing all our trump cards to a god-like civilization with unclear intentions!"

"Furthermore, not only can we not send out SOS messages, but we also cannot send out red alerts! Xuan, immediately terminate our proposed red alert plan."

"Yes, Lieutenant Colonel. The dialect-encrypted red alert has been deactivated."

Gu Yu found himself in an unprecedented decision-making dilemma.

Taking a step forward leads to an unpredictable abyss; taking a step back means missing out on a future forever.

Xuanjian, who had been silent all along, suddenly spoke.

"Lieutenant Colonel, although I cannot understand or calculate the situation of that 'green-eyed girl,' have you noticed a detail that we have overlooked?"

"What details?"

"Her initial contact was only in response to the 'selfie' you sent the first time."

"But in fact, in the more than 30 days after you woke up the Zhurong spacecraft, we sent a lot of construction progress reports and telemetry data to Earth during almost every window of opportunity."

"However, she never responded based on any communications we had with Tianwen-1."

Gu Yu paused for a moment, then quickly pulled up all the communication logs.

Xuanjian was right; both of their attempts to contact him were perfectly timed to avoid his normal communication with Earth.

"Therefore, I made a bold guess. It is very likely that the Mars jump caused some kind of connection between our spacetime and the other world."

"Any broadcast signal sent directly to the 'Void' may be captured by this channel and transmitted to the other party."

"This speculation is based on the fact that after you successfully sent the first photo to Earth, you conducted another omnidirectional broadcast test to verify whether the window period was indeed fourteen minutes."

"That happened to be the only time we didn't launch blindly during the Tianwen-1 launch window!"

"Therefore, it is very likely that when the Zhurong and Tianwen-1 'shake hands' during the window period, a kind of... signal jamming will be formed! This will prevent that mysterious channel from capturing information."

Gu Yu's eyes lit up instantly!

He understood what Xuanjian meant; it was like having a one-way mirror between two rooms. Normally, if you shout into the room, the people outside can hear you.

But when you pick up a walkie-talkie and talk directly to someone in another room, the person outside can't hear you!

Gu Yu's voice was excited, "You mean we can take a gamble? As long as we communicate during the Tianwen-1 communication window, that celestial being... might not be able to hear us?"

"Yes, Lieutenant Colonel. From a probability and information theory perspective, the likelihood is higher than 85%."