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

On the fifth night, something second appeared in the darkness.

It's not a light spot.

It was a shadow.

Xiaoman was the first to see it on the DreamNet listening platform.

She saw that the darkness was no longer a flat sheet. Something was moving behind it. The movement was small, but it was more unsettling than the hundreds of meters the spark had moved.

"There's someone there," she said.

Everyone in the main control room tensed up at the same time.

"Human? Or fire?"

"None of those," Xiaoman said, her voice trembling. "It's the thing that comes after."

On the Zhurong Terrace, the fire was moved forward a little further.

This time, more was moved than yesterday.

Lu Chengong stared at the orbital diagram, his brows furrowed.

"It's not going into the stove."

"Which way are we going?"

"Towards that darkness."

Upon hearing this, Wen Zhaolin's expression completely changed.

He lifted the old blanket, walked to the screen, his voice trembling slightly.

"If the flame is heading towards that darkness, it means it wants to return to a place other than Zhurong Terrace."

Where is it?

"This is the place where it was originally taken out of there."

Qin Lan immediately pressed, "Did they get it out from inside? Who did it?"

Wen Zhaolin closed his eyes briefly.

"It's an unparsed format," he said. "It's the same format used for seals."

No one spoke in the main control room.

This answer connects the two things.

The darkness in deep space, the seals, the metal pieces of the toolbox, the paragraph with the number zero erased—they are all the same thing.

The fire was taken from that set of things.

"What are you going to do with it?" Xu Wangshu asked.

"As evidence," Wen Zhaolin said. "Back then, a batch of things were taken out of there and given to the world for safekeeping. The fire seed was one of them."

"So what it means now is..."

"It wants to go back."

Xu Wangshu stared at the screen for a long time.

Then she said something very slowly.

"So we kept asking the fire if it was willing to go into the stove."

"Actually, it kept asking if it could go back."

Lu Chengong then asked, "Then why did it knock three times?"

"Because on the way back, someone has to acknowledge that it's gone first," Xu Wangshu said. "The ninth one is missing, and it's waiting for someone to finish striking those three times for it."

"Do we need to knock three times?"

"It wasn't us," Xu Wangshu said. "It knocked on its own. It was waiting for someone to hear it."

Qin Lan understood a little, and frowned: "So we don't need to do anything now, we just need to say 'I heard you'?"

"More or less," Xu Wangshu said, "but we can't just say it carelessly."

"What's so amazing about it?"

"When we say 'we heard it,' it's as if we're admitting that humanity was aware of it from beginning to end," Xu Wangshu said. "When it was taken out back then, was humanity aware of it? If they were aware, they need to explain why they didn't stop it then. If they weren't aware, why are they stopping it now?"

The main control room fell silent.

Everyone then realized that the hardest part wasn't knocking those three times.

It was to lift the old account book that followed those three strokes onto the table.

That night, no one answered the flame.

Xu Wangshu did only one thing.

She wrote down the darkness, the spark, and the ninth piece in a document.

The material yielded no conclusion.

There is only one sentence at the end:

No one can know for sure who's behind that door.

After she finished writing it, she had everyone sign it.

It's not about agreeing, it's about being aware of it.

That night, after the signing, the spark moved inside a third time on its own.

This time, it moved even more.