172: Chapter 172 Star Coordinates

The moment Bai Ya sealed the paper into the Fire Seal bag, ink finally began to slowly emerge on the surface.

It wasn't a complete sentence, just a string of cold, hard characters: longitude, latitude, nautical chart number, with a strange note appended at the end.

【 Starry Sky Station, do not turn on the main light. 】

Zhao Ye's brows knitted together as he read: "What is Starry Sky Station? Is it for stargazing, or looking at the sea?"

Tide took off her soaked gloves, revealing her fingertips, which had turned pale and wrinkled from being soaked in saltwater. She stared at the string of numbers for a few seconds, her expression darkening.

"It's an old navigational beacon monitoring point."

"Twenty-seven nautical miles east of Linhai, there used to be a semi-automatic offshore monitoring station, considered a forward site for Wanghai No. 7. Later, when the nautical charts were revised, that place was directly decommissioned. In official archives, it's called Starry Sky Station; basically, no locals know about it."

Bai Ya looked up at her: "How do you know?"

Tide tugged at the corner of her mouth, failing to smile: "I used to get bored during night shifts and loved flipping through the registry of abandoned facilities to pass the time. Don't look at me like that; at three in the morning in the dispatch center, there's not a single person to talk to. If you don't look through some junk, you'll go crazy."

Zhao Ye nodded solemnly: "Fair enough, that makes sense."

He said it so earnestly that Tide was almost amused to the point of anger.

Grey Net quickly pulled up the remaining historical records.

In its early years, Starry Sky Station was responsible for monitoring Tide levels, storms, offshore light signals, and radio. After a typhoon, it completely lost contact. Officials sent people to the island for repairs, only to find an empty monitoring room—all lighting fixtures had been removed, and only one line of text remained on the wall.

Do not light lamps for the Black Shore.

Lu Chen looked at this record, his fingertips tapping lightly on the edge of the stone tablet.

The Black Shore did not exert all its power on Linhai.

It is looking for people who can see it.

People who can see through the Black Shore's trajectory, record coordinates, and send messages back to the human world are often the most easily marked by it in return, becoming the guide stones for it to land.

"Is Starry Sky still alive?" Xu Minglan asked in a low voice.

No one could give a definitive answer.

Grey Net could not retrieve Starry Sky's true identity, only piecing together a few intermittent human voices from the offshore radio signals. The voice was very young, always wrapped in electrical noise, sometimes sounding like it was laughing, sometimes sounding like it was shivering from the cold.

【 ...Don't turn on the main light. 】

【 It is not afraid of light. 】

【 It is waiting for you to light up the path clearly. 】

Bai Ya listened to it twice, then took off his headset.

"This person isn't asking for help," he said with a certain tone. "They are warning us not to fall into a trap."

Zhao Ye frowned: "Then why did this piece of paper specifically point to you?"

Bai Ya raised the Fire Seal bag and brought it under the light. The crow feather seal on the paper's surface was slowly unfolding, like a black bird that had drowned and then opened its eyes again, eerie and sinister.

"Because I have been tracking the Black Shore by following its traces."

"It discovered you?"

"Discovery is a strong word," Bai Ya said, his tone poor, carrying a hint of coldness from being provoked. "It is inviting me to keep chasing."

Tang Zhiwei walked over from the direction of the settlement vehicle, still holding a half-filled form in her hand. After hearing the whole story, she spoke directly: "Can we refuse?"

Bai Ya turned his head to look at her.

Tang Zhiwei's face was expressionless, her tone pragmatic to the point of coldness: "I'm not urging you to be a hero. I'm asking if things will get worse if we refuse."

The channel went silent for a moment.

Bai Ya resealed the paper bag.

"They will."

The Black Shore throwing out coordinates was never about waiting for Torch to go and save people. It was more likely an attempt to lure Torch into lighting up a sea path, only to use that light to counter-attack the three-city fire map.

But if they didn't go, Starry Sky Station's signal would only get weaker and weaker. The hidden lamp coordinates that Deputy Captain He Yuan had exchanged his life for would also become a severed line that could never be reconnected.

Lu Chen did not give an order immediately.

He had Zero spread out the three-city fire map of Qinghe, Jiangbei, and Linhai.

The fire lines of the three cities were still unstable. Linhai's third anchor had only just established its Foundation; the entire Fire Map was like a freshly dried fishing net, its edges still stained with the salt frost of the black Tide. Rashly pulling the lamp line out to the open sea would likely tear open a larger entrance for the Black Shore.

But if they didn't pull it, Torch would forever be forced to passively wait for the darkness to reach the shore.

Lu Chen's gaze fell on the very edge of the Fire Map.

There was a very faint light there.

It wasn't an anchor point, nor a Fire Seal; it was that hidden lamp Deputy Captain He Yuan had left behind. After it was fixed by Torch's naming, it cast a glimmer of light outside the Fire Map.

It was like the hand of a dead person still reaching out over the sea.

"Do not turn on the main light first," Lu Chen said.

Zero responded: "I suggest establishing a low-brightness observation line."

"What do we use to build it?" Bai Ya asked.

Lu Chen looked at the crow feather seal.

"Use the bait it thinks can hook you."

Bai Ya was silent for a second, then suddenly let out a low laugh.

"Fine."

"It wants me to follow the feathers and find it."

"Then I'll let it see that crows can also carry threads."

Outside the Linhai Old Lighthouse, the wick of the hidden lamp tilted slightly toward the open sea, its light dimmed to the lowest level.

At the same moment, the radio at Starry Sky Station sounded again.

Amidst the chaotic noise, the young voice drifted out intermittently.

【 Don't... don't let the light shine on the sea surface. 】

【 Shine it below. 】

【 There is a path below. 】

Bai Ya looked up at the boundless Black Sea.

Beneath the sea surface, there wasn't even a speck of starlight; it was as deep and dark as ink that wouldn't dissolve.

But he suddenly had an illusion—something was lifting its head from the deep sea, quietly watching him.

Starry Sky's radio was never stable. Every ten minutes or so, a tapping sound would ring out in the channel—three long, two short, a brief pause, then repeated. Bai Ya had Grey Net compare it and confirmed it wasn't a standard distress code, but a manual confirmation signal used during maintenance of old-fashioned navigational beacon stations.

The other party was telling them: I am still awake, I can still tell the time, I have not been completely taken by the Black Shore.

When Tide heard that tapping sound, her eyes flickered. She said that an old master at the dispatch center used to love tapping the table like that—three taps before scolding someone, and two taps after finishing, meaning the matter wasn't over yet. She stopped herself halfway through. In a place like the Old Port, too many people's habits remained in night shifts, Tide tables, and broken radios; the people were gone, but their voices still drifted on the sea surface.

Lu Chen did not directly list Starry Sky as a Candidate. The information was too scarce, and the risk was too high. Torch was not a charity that pulled people into its System just because it heard a cry for help. Zero suggested categorizing it as an "Offshore Contact Object"; Lu Chen looked at the words, picked up a pen, and changed it to "Surviving Offshore Contact Object."

It was only a difference of one word, but the weight was completely different. That flickering glimmer on the Fire Map had clearly stabilized a bit.

Bai Ya stared at the classification column for a long while without speaking. After a while, he put his headset back on and, facing the static-filled channel, tapped the table three times, then tapped twice more.

The radio remained silent for a long time before finally returning the exact same rhythm. The sound was very light, like a nail being tapped in the darkness—a dull thud, yet solid.

Shen Qinghe flipped through the old archives of Starry Sky Station twice and discovered that a name in the maintenance records had been deliberately crossed out. It wasn't deleted by the System; it had been layered over with black ink until it was dead, the ink soaking through the back of the page. She held the paper up to the light and faintly saw a small note in the margin: Night shift alone, not recommended to turn on high lights.

In that instant, she suddenly understood: Starry Sky's repeated warnings not to turn on the main light were never just a guess. It was because someone had turned it on once, and then something had happened.

Bai Ya sent the scan of the crossed-out name to The Arbiter. The other party replied with only one sentence: The person who crossed out the name is more afraid of the name being seen than the person who deleted the file.

Bai Ya stared at this sentence for a few seconds, feeling for the first time that this rigid official contact wasn't entirely useless.