Don't go to the moon, there are gods on the far side of the moon.

On the morning of the ninth day, the fragment of the ninth day lit up by itself.

It wasn't Lu Chengong who activated it. He was still asleep, the broken string lying on his bedside table. Of the two extinguishing ends of the shard, one suddenly lit up for half a second, then went out again.

The first thing Lu Chengong said when he woke up was, "It wasn't me."

Luo Xu immediately made a record: time, brightness, duration, orbital position at the time, cabin temperature, and Lu Chengong's position at the time. She made two copies of these, one for the return capsule and one to send back to Seven Cities.

"Why are you checking my location?" Lu Chenggong asked.

"If you can't prove it's not you, others can judge for themselves." Luo Xu said, "If you can't prove it's not you, others can judge for themselves."

The third pulse appeared in the evening.

This time, the pulses were detected in all seven cities. The direction of the pulses was very clear, pointing to a point outside Mars' orbit—the very narrow band where the fire seed from Zhurongtai lingered.

"It's responding to the Zhurong Terrace," Qin Lan said.

"Or rather, it's the Zhurong Terrace that's calling it," the examiner said.

"What should we call it?" Lu Chenggong asked.

"I don't know," the inspector said, "but for fire, sometimes a shout and a spark are the same thing."

Lu Chengong reattached the broken string to his shoulder. He did not close the bow.

"What about the old rules of the Houyi sequence?" Lin Jibai asked.

"There's only one," Lu Chenggong said. "The fragment was found to have activated spontaneously, and it can be disposed of independently."

"What does 'self-disposal' mean?"

"Just shoot," Lu Chengong said. "The old rules state that any fragment that can move on its own is an out-of-control fragment."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

Lu Chengong thought for a long time. He took the broken string down again and placed it on the table.

"I won't shoot," he said, "but I'll watch it."

One of the seven cities raised an objection: the fragments activated spontaneously, which is a risk event and should be stored in the partition first.

"Putting it in a partition is also a form of disposal," Lu Chenggong said. "Disposing of it once means acknowledging that it needs to be managed by someone else."

"So if we just leave it there, won't nobody care?"

"It's not that nobody's in charge," he said. "I'm watching, and I can intervene at any time. The difference is whether I start intervening now or wait until it starts moving."

He did something else: he turned all seven still-lit fragments down to the lowest setting, and then had Qin Lan add a physical barrier between him and Zhang Xian—a non-conductive iron plate.

"Why do we need a partition?" Qin Lan asked.

"Because I'm not sure whether it will light up first or I will move first when it lights up next time," Lu Chenggong said.

"If you isolate yourself, won't you be even less able to respond immediately?"

"Yes," he said, "that's exactly what I want, a slower pace."

Xu Wangshu wrote a statement outlining his approach: The current status of the Houyi sequence is observation; it will not be shot down, extinguished, or handed over; I am in position and will voluntarily delay.

"This is called delayed handling," Xu Wangshu said. "It doesn't mean we're ignoring it; it means we're postponing the time for intervention."

"What are the benefits?"

"The advantage is that when it actually moves, we know first what it wants to do, not what we did."

Beitianmen's black plate read the statement and, for the first time, neither classified it as a "dangerous source" nor as "safe."

It only wrote: The Houyi sequence is under observation as defined by the author.

That night, the fire moved towards the empty space for the third time.

It did not approach Earth.

It simply lowered the light a little more, as if waiting for the fragments of the nine suns to answer.