212: Chapter 212 Eyes Can Reach Further Than the Defense Line

The cup of soy milk on the workbench was left behind in reality, and the concrete floor beneath Jiang Lin's feet had already been replaced by the grey load-bearing plates of Assembly Bay 1.

Eighteen engineering hard cases still surrounded him, the positions of their wheels, handles, and seals all identical to those in the independent warehouse. The corners of the four outermost cases fell precisely within the four white ceramic markers on the floor.

The load sensors in the assembly bay recorded a set of instantaneous changes, and the terminal beneath the overhead lights immediately lit up.

[New transport units in Round 14: 18]

[Numbering continuity: Passed]

[Receiving area structural response: Within baseline]

Jiang Lin first locked the two sets of case wheels closest to him and walked a circle along the reserved passageway.

The seals were intact, the impact indicator tabs were still milky white, and not a single one of the eighteen cases had touched the fixed components in the assembly bay.

Structural changes, pollution spread, residual power anomalies, and unknown execution requests were also brought up on the same screen; the first three remained green, while the last one was still zero.

At the northern reference position, the status light of G-Explorer-C lit up after an interval of four seconds.

Judging from the Outpost timing system, less than one sampling cycle had passed between Jiang Lin's last disappearance and this appearance, and the old scratch beneath the platform's belly also remained right in place.

Jiang Lin walked over and touched that scratch.

"This time there is a bit more luggage."

The status light went out according to its original cycle.

Jiang Lin connected the low-level overhead track outside the boundary, and the transport platform left behind at the Outpost drove out from the standby area. The robotic arm clamped onto the stress points on both sides of T14-01 and dragged the first case toward the eastern isolation position.

The eighteen cases had been arranged for three nights in reality, and once they reached the Wasteland here, they had to be arranged all over again.

The loading and unloading equipment here did not need overtime pay calculated, but not a single battery cycle or joint lifespan could be spared.

The first sequence at the very front was unsealed first, and the 3D scanner, structural echo detector, composite gas detector, and high-precision clock synchronization equipment were successively connected to the Outpost's power supply.

The remaining cases retained their seals and were transferred respectively to the drying area, chemical isolation position, and room-temperature supplies area.

Jiang Lin fixed the current round's task card to the left side of the console and overlaid the landing point scan of the eighteen cases onto the vacant field data left behind before his last departure.

The four ceramic markers could only prove that this landing point was not occupied, and the things brought in the next round might not necessarily be eighteen narrow cases measuring five hundred and twenty millimeters wide.

Long materials, clustered batteries, liquid containers that could not be inverted, and heavier instruments all required different receiving methods, yet around the teleportation coordinates, no pillars, hooks, cables, or transport vehicles forgotten and left behind could be left behind.

He redrew a permanent boundary circle outside the ceramic markers.

Inside the boundary, only load-bearing plates flush with the ground, load sensors, and embedded positioning blocks were laid. The two low-level overhead tracks stopped outside, and when the robotic arm unfolded, it had to be able to cover the entire landing area, and after folding up, it had to completely retreat beyond the solid red line.

The first load-bearing plate was laid into the ground on the fifth day of this round.

H-02 was responsible for calibrating the plate gaps, the transport platform carried dummy loads, and Jiang Lin rechecked every subsidence and grounding continuity along the outer ring.

On the eleventh day, an eight-hundred-kilogram test case with its front right wheel locked was placed into the furthest corner of the receiving area, and two robotic arms completed clamping, turning, and isolated transfer from outside the red line.

After the test case was dragged away, the top-down view was once again left with only a blank rectangle.

[ TRANSFER RECEIVE-01 ]

[ Fixed reception field: Passed ]

[ Effective receiving area: Clear ]

[ Fifteenth transmission placeholder protection: Enabled ]

Over the years, the Outpost had added an assembly bay, test area, storage array, and overhead tracks, yet this place had to be built to be increasingly empty.

Jiang Lin changed the first task to completed, yet still locked the occupancy permission of the receiving area outside the highest level of the entire Outpost.

Ranking ahead of the hazardous area surveying were those two copies of the civilization kernel.

The low-dependency civilization kernel in OUTER CACHE-07 had been continuously preserved for forty years, and its integrity verification had always passed, yet there was only physical copy number 0001 available for independent recovery.

Jiang Lin unpacked the two offline storage cases; the hard drive batches, controller firmware, and verification programs of the two sets of arrays were staggered from each other, and even the index cache used during full-disk reconstruction was not shared.

After seventy-two hours of cold soaking, three rounds of full-disk writing, twenty-four hours of power outage, and powering back on were all completed, the two sets of empty arrays finally obtained the qualification to head to OUTER CACHE-07.

They entered the equipment bay along existing safe routes, read-only copied from number 0001, and respectively handed them over to two offline terminals that had never contacted the source disk index to reconstruct the complete dependency tree.

Metrology, material identification, energy, water and public health, agriculture, basic medicine, engineering standards, communication, and basic education were restored step-by-step from the lowest dependency layer, and the three sets of arrays remained consistent at every verifiable node.

The new copies then left the equipment bay; number 0002 was sent to the Outpost underground storage room, while number 0003 entered the independent sealing vault beneath that original Stone House.

The three locations did not share power, ventilation, or data links, and usually no single copy was kept online.

On the twenty-third day of this round, the old Stone House sealing vault transmitted back the final offline recovery signature.

[ CIVILIZATION RECOVERY KERNEL / LOW-DEPENDENCY ]

[ 0001 / OUTER CACHE-07: Valid ]

[ 0002 / Outpost Underground Storage Room: Valid ]

[ 0003 / Old Stone House Independent Sealing Vault: Valid ]

[ Independent Valid Copies: 3 ]

Jiang Lin wrote the three signatures into a read-only disk, paper records, and maintenance ledgers respectively, only then lifting the total ban of the Fifth Fleet on the periphery of the nine failure zones.

The danger zones in the topology map remained red; what was opened were only remote scanning, optical path testing, and relay deployment extending outward from the existing safety lines.

He returned to Assembly Bay 1, unpacked T14-18, and took out that forty-one-year calendar from above the dehydrated food and cold-resistant seeds.

Two bundles of red paper and that roll of coarse cotton thread used for wrapping zongzi still remained inside the case; the dates had not arrived yet for the time being.

Jiang Lin clipped the calendar into the transparent board on the control room wall, wrote "0003 sealing completed" in the blank space of the twenty-third day, and pinned the unsealing permit of the second sequence beneath the calendar.

The Fifth Fleet had regrouped in front of the northern maintenance door.

Reconnaissance unit G-01C walked at the very front, the cable machine and power machine towed surveying equipment and relays, and H-01 and H-02 respectively carried the force-controlled operation cabin and companion rescue cabin on their backs.

G-Explorer-C still remained at the northern reference position.

Its hazard zone qualification had long been revoked, and nearly a hundred years of full-lifecycle records did not need another expedition added to prove that it could still walk.

When Jiang Lin passed by its side, he casually patted its outer shell.

"You will still be keeping watch this round."

Four seconds later, the status light behind him lit up once as usual.

When Case Number 5 landed and stabilized at the thirty-seven-meter well bottom, the tension on the hoisting rope lightened by a notch.

Jiang Lin steadied the case body, waiting for all four vibration-damping feet to be fully compressed before unclipping the hook lowered from the surface.

The number on the case cover was directly facing his headlamp.

[ Case 5 / Independent Gravitometer ]

The wellhead was more than a dozen stories high from here, and looking up, one could only see a small circle illuminated by work lights.

That inclined maintenance duty room was right above the circular opening, half-buried in the grayish-white gentle slope of Northeast Seventy-Three, and the precast slabs holding down the entrance were still supported by a hydraulic jacking frame and three sets of steel shims to this day.

Wind poured in from the damaged walls, then fell down along the vertical shaft, leaving only a wisp of cold air drifting against the well wall.

At twelve meters, twenty-four meters, and thirty-six meters, three communication relays each guarded a section of the maintenance ladder, and their green status lights formed a vertical line from top to bottom.

Initially, these positions could only accommodate a single six-legged robot slowly crawling down.

Later, Jiang Lin added a winch, load-bearing guide rails, and two temporary parking racks before the engineering cases became qualified to come to the well bottom.

Case Number 1 subsequently dropped down and stopped beside Case Number 5.

Jiang Lin pushed the two cases onto the re-poured foundation on the east side of the well wall, unpacked the outer waterproof cover, and fixed the first set of "Lunar Back - NE-73" bidirectional measuring instruments and the gravitometer side by side.

After the instrument was powered on, attitude leveling took seven minutes.

The zero point was still slowly creeping, so Jiang Lin dragged the calibration task that was originally scheduled for later to the very front, letting it record the well bottom's temperature, barometric pressure, and micro-vibrations first.

The Fifth Fleet stopped at the inclined passageway entrance; the power machine carried the cable spool on its back, two engineering platforms each towed a narrow-body transport vehicle, and the reconnaissance aircraft had already refreshed the environmental data ahead twice.

The cable machine tried to move forward by half a wheel diameter, but was stopped in place by Jiang Lin.

"Wait a little longer."

"The gravitometer just rode a thirty-seven-meter crane. Making it speak now is likely to include what it witnessed along the way."

The machine of course could not understand this consideration, but it honestly remained outside the task boundary.

When the zero-point drift entered the preset interval, Jiang Lin set the well bottom station as Point B and issued a synchronization command to Point A in the surface duty room.

The clocks of the two positions began to cross-verify each other, and the first set of bidirectional measurements was officially established.

The equipment on the back of the moon had long lost contact, and these four sets of instruments were not responsible for sending signals to the moon.

What they needed to do was put the lunar back archives and the NE-73 site into the same set of positive and negative problems, predicting local residuals based on known engineering parameters while retro-calculating underground mass distribution from site residuals; both sides had to close under the same set of parameters.

Before closure, the so-called correlation was merely a hyphen in the task name.

Jiang Lin left the first segment of records for Point B and led the Fifth Fleet to continue downward.

Walking seventy-nine meters down the inclined passageway, the old isolation door squeezed out from the edge of the headlamp.

The upper part of the door body had once been bent inward by a cave-in, and the gap of less than seventy centimeters at the bottom had later been propped open from the sides to sixty-one centimeters.

The two thin jacks had been removed, the hydraulic support frame still propped against the outside of the door frame, and white graduation lines made after multiple re-measurements remained on the steel beam.

The system had retracted the latch tongue long ago, and the door panel itself still only recognized the force exerted by the rock strata.

The reconnaissance aircraft retracted its foot ends and drilled sideways through the door gap.

The power machine unloaded the cable spool, while the two engineering platforms left the transport cases on the south side of the door, switching to the narrow-gauge trailers long prepared behind the door.

Jiang Lin took off his backpack, pushed it through the door gap first, and then squeezed in sideways between the steel plate and the rock wall.

The back of his protective suit brushed against the door panel, bringing down a small piece of dry, hard rust ash.

Deep wheel tracks still remained on the ground on the north side of the door, ground out repeatedly over the past decades by transporting cooling components, storage arrays, and maintenance modules.

The wheel tracks extended forward for more than a dozen meters, passed through a circular isolation door more than four meters in diameter, and entered the OR-MAINT-NE73 maintenance station.

Two tracks extended northward from the center of the platform; the illumination could only chase out for over a hundred meters, and any further fell into darkness.

OR-MV-073-04 was parked at the left maintenance position.

This seven-meter-long flat maintenance vehicle still retained its original grey-black outer shell, its two folding robotic arms retracted at the edge of the cargo bed, and the amber status light on the roof lit up once every forty-seven seconds.

Beneath the outer shell, however, more than one round of things had been replaced.

Traction energy storage was supplied by external modules, the cooling pump group and pressure feedback came from Jiang Lin's processing line, and the locked brake actuators had also been replaced with re-ground rollers and seals.

The native identity unit deep inside had been preserved to this day.

Relying on this identity, it had brought Jiang Lin into the TM-7 hull maintenance port and had also found a local storage node capable of receiving the civilization kernel for OUTER CACHE-07.

As for the rest of the vehicle, it had long lived to become a maintenance ledger spanning decades.

Case Number 3 and Case Number 7 were fixed to the platform foundation, and Point C was established accordingly.

The combined detector in Case Number 10 was also left here, used to record the neutrino and high-energy particle background that might contaminate the measurement chain.

After completing the station self-test, Jiang Lin redistributed the remaining equipment to the Fifth Fleet.

Cases Number 4, 8, and 11 were to be sent to OUTER CACHE-07, Cases Number 13 through 16 were left in the isolated storage bays of the maintenance station, and Case Number 17, the low-temperature sealed sampling cabin, was towed solely by the power machine.

As long as no samples worth keeping in place were discovered along the way, it would remain empty.

Jiang Lin started the narrow-gauge transport vehicle, and its wheels rolled northward along the old tracks.

The length of the system route leading to OUTER CACHE-07 was 3.7 kilometers, and the transport vehicle's odometer would ultimately reach 4.42 kilometers.

The extra seven-hundred-odd meters came from detours.

When this road was first opened, there were a total of nine heavily failed maintenance zones along the way. Broken cooling branches, collapsed ventilation ducts, flooded equipment corridors, and non-working vertical transfer shafts crowded together, gathering almost every failure that could possibly occur after the catastrophe.

Afterward, Jiang Lin did not repair them one by one back to their original state.

Where detours were possible, detour lines were left; where reinforcement was necessary, supports were added; and all old roads whose load-bearing capacity could not be proven remained sealed.

The foremost ventilation duct collapse zone now supported a section of low-level overhead track; transport cases slid past beneath the supports, while humans still had to bend over to walk through the twenty-plus meters.

Most of the old stagnant water in the second equipment corridor had receded, but a circle of white deposits remained at the base of the wall, precisely marking where the water level had reached back then.

The third automatic door was still squeezed together with the wall, and the cable hole with its outer frame removed had been expanded into a narrow passageway, its edges wrapped with several layers of long-hardened protective rubber strips.

The Fifth Fleet passed the transport cases across one by one, and Jiang Lin followed at the very end, casually checking the readings of two loose monitoring pieces.

The sixth failure zone was located at 2.41 kilometers of the old mileage.

Here it looked actually the most complete; the ceiling was flat, the bundle of tubes was still on the supports, three low-power guide lights lined up along the center of the passageway, and only a thin layer of dust fell on the ground.

Yet in front of the first light stood a permanent no-entry rack.

The eight-millimeter probe hole in the center of the rack had been sealed, and the initial structural scan was preserved next to it.

The so-called ground was only over forty millimeters thick, beneath which was the entirely collapsed vertical transfer well, with dust and local sediments maintaining a thin shell above the void.

The guide lights still pointed straight ahead according to the pre-catastrophe topology, and the red light lined up all the way from behind the no-entry rack to the other side of the fault.

It knew where the road used to be, but it did not know how much thickness that road had left.

The transport vehicle hugged the western wall and turned into the abandoned cable maintenance corridor.

The narrowest point of the corridor was only 1.2 meters, and the scratches on the right cable tray were stacked layer upon layer, all being size records left behind by successive transport cases.

When this section of the road bypassed the vertical transfer well and reconnected to the main passageway, the odometer had increased by 680 meters.

The subsequent three failure zones were respectively added with fixed ladders, low-level bridge plates, and two mechanical guardrails; the Fifth Fleet walked much more easily than initially, yet still spent nearly five hours.

When the odometer reached 4.42 kilometers, the low equipment bay embedded in the bedrock finally appeared in the lights.

The identification sign above the bay door was still lit.

[ OUTER CACHE-07 ]

[ Frozen Preservation ]

The equipment bay was less than twenty meters long, its ceiling only half a body-length higher than Jiang Lin, and six sets of grey-black case bodies were arranged along the western wall, five sets already extinguished, while the innermost set still maintained a dark red status band.

That past low-dependency civilization kernel with an integrity of only 73.16% was moved out bit by bit from right here.

Now the receiver had been transferred to a stable isolated storage area, with the replacement filter and three groups of external cooling branch lines occupying the southern side of the equipment bay, where the colors of the old and new welds on the pipe walls could be distinguished at a glance.

The Fifth Fleet delivered Box No. 4 and Box No. 8 into the northernmost vacant spaces, and Point D joined the measurement chain accordingly.

The four sites lined up all the way from the shallow surface slope to the underground cache area, spanning a horizontal distance of over four kilometers and a vertical drop of nearly a hundred meters.

Jiang Lin completed the leveling at Point D and brought up the current zero points of the four gravimeters side by side on the screen.

The first round of data did not yield anything conclusive.

Earth tides, barometric pressure changes, downhole temperature drift, the slow relaxation of equipment bases, and the startup and shutdown of underground cooling branches each occupied different frequency bands, and when stacked together, they were enough to drown out the true static residuals.

Therefore, the four gravimeters rotated positions through three rounds over the next sixty-three days.

Number Five moved from Point B to Point C, Number Seven went to Point D, Number Eight returned to the bottom of the well, and Number Six was transported to the shallow surface slope.

After each relocation, they had to be re-leveled, temperature-stabilized, and then record a complete Earth tide cycle once more.

Instrument errors followed the instruments, while site residuals remained in place.

At the end of the third round of relocation, the spatial gradients given by the four sets of equipment fell back onto the same curve.

The joint detectors in boxes No. 9 through No. 12 remained synchronized with the four sites throughout, while the analysis units in boxes No. 13 through No. 16 took turns completing background surveys of the route's spectrum, radiation, and microscopic residues.

The high-energy particle background showed no changes synchronized with the anomaly items, and neither the cooling branch materials, downhole gases, nor local radioactive deposits entered the abnormal frequency band of the gravimeters.

Jiang Lin fed the remaining terms into the existing structural model of Northeast Seventy-Three.

Natural rock layers and known facilities could explain most of the changes, but a ring of inescapable mass residuals remained deep in the northern side.

It did not point to a centralized high-density object.

The residuals were distributed along an arc, rising sequentially on both sides of the existing route, with sixteen repeating structures enclosing a ring much larger than OUTER CACHE-07.

One of the reference axes deviated twelve degrees from true north.

Jiang Lin brought up the old gravity correction table from the farside lunar engineering archives onto the right screen.

That file came from the lunar farside observation facility before the cataclysm, originally used to eliminate local disturbances caused by underground equipment, support rings, and mass adjustment cabins on precision measurements.

He first removed the lunar topography, gravity field magnitude, and facility scale, retaining only the dimensionless partitioning order, reference axes, and mass ratios between adjacent sectors.

The two sets of charts closed at the sixteenth sector.

The reference axis similarly deviated twelve degrees from the local baseline north.

Jiang Lin removed each of the four onsite sites in turn and redid the leave-one-out cross-validation.

Regardless of which set of data was removed, the annular residuals and the sixteen partitions still existed, only the confidence intervals of the adjacent boundaries widened accordingly.

The final round of results entered the mission page.

[Northeast Seventy-Three Onsite Physics Resurvey: Complete]

[Anomaly Nature: Stable Mass Distribution Residuals]

[Farside Anomaly Correlation: Similar Engineering Structures and Common Calibration Baseline]

[Long-Distance Physics Coupling: No Evidence]

The Northeast Seventy-Three underground facilities and the lunar farside observation engineering originated from the same large-scale engineering system, sharing at least the sixteen-partition structure and a similar calibration baseline.

Meanwhile, the annular structure of the Seventh Canopy Station, standing sixty meters above the Wasteland, happened to possess sixteen spokes and a central axis twelve degrees west of north.

In the mission page, the Seventh Canopy Station remained in the candidate column.

That surface facility lacked comparable mass distribution data and could only be listed as the next cross-validation target for the current stage.

However, the calibration table in the lunar farside archives also brought a string of previously unrecognized routing annotations.

[OBS_ARCHIVE/MIRROR REFERENCE]

[LOCAL MAINTENANCE INDEX: 07]

This string of annotations was completely identical to a long-time grayed-out directory in the maintenance volume on the north side of OUTER CACHE-07.

Jiang Lin changed the two-way measurement chain between Point C and Point D into a directional detection mode, and had OR-MV-073-04 perform a native identity self-check.

As the forty-seven-second cycle reached its end, the maintenance vehicle sent a very short set of verification pulses to the local bus.

The main signal returned to the Northeast Seventy-Three dispatch station along the known maintenance optical path, while a small portion of the energy continued to propagate along an unregistered branch behind the north wall of OUTER CACHE-07, forming a stable echo at a passive branching structure.

The multipath signals brought by the metal pipelines were still numerous, with the strongest one even pointing southeast.

After the four measurement stations provided independent time differences, the only direction that could truly satisfy both the propagation time and phase relationships simultaneously was the north side.

Jiang Lin had the Fifth Fleet clear the north wall of the equipment bay.

Behind the external pipelines of the freezing loop, a narrow door previously judged to be unnecessary for maintenance was exposed.

Behind the door was a branch room of over a dozen square meters, with nine optical path junction boxes embedded in the wall, arranged in two columns from one to nine, their surfaces covered with a layer of dust even thicker than that in the equipment bay.

These nine optical paths shared a number with the nine failed maintenance areas along the incoming path, but otherwise had no relationship.

Jiang Lin uniformly changed the former to A-01 through A-09 in the current map, to prevent the mission records from conflicting with each other later.

The cable machine plugged the read-only probe into A-01.

The optical pulse ran more than 2,600 meters northward along the old line, terminating abruptly after a regular high-loss zone.

A-02 and A-03 had different lengths, yet left behind the same structure at their ends.

The three high-loss zones were all 0.8 meters, each preceded and followed by a group of weak reflection points with identical spacing.

Jiang Lin found the corresponding components from the low-dependency maintenance volume.

[OPTICAL FIREBREAK/OF-9]

[Trigger Result: Cut off the two-way optical paths, burn out the local execution interface, and retain the outer passive mirror]

Natural collapse would leave behind bends, stretching, and a string of messy reflections, but the three curves before him ended neatly at their respective OF-9s.

The remaining six junction boxes were tested in turn by the Fifth Fleet, with no changes in the results.

All nine optical isolators had acted, and the main path leading to the higher-level observation archives was actively severed at some point before or after the cataclysm.

The trigger and the cause of the trigger remained outside the evidence.

An upturned old label was stuck to the inside of the A-07 box cover.

The reconnaissance drone pressed it twice, but the edges of the label quickly rolled up again.

Jiang Lin stopped its mechanical arm as it reached out for the third time.

"Forget it, in reality, this kind of work has to be left to more professional people."

The lens moved close to the deglued spot, revealing a line of earlier carved lettering underneath.

[ROUTE-07/MIRROR MAINTENANCE]

The cable machine connected to both ends of the isolator respectively.

The input side still terminated at OF-9, but the output side had an extra 417 meters of echo, ending in a low-loss regular terminal.

The main optical path had been severed, but a maintenance bypass leading to the passive mirror was still retained outside the isolator.

Structural echoes showed that there was a 74-centimeter-high interlayer behind the north wall of the branch room, with the entrance sealed by a composite plug plate and four bolts hidden on the inner side of the wall.

Two engineering platforms established temporary stress points outside the plug plate, first moving away the lateral load borne by the upper right corner.

The last stuck bolt then backed out.

The plug plate moved outward by twelve centimeters, and a layer of fine dust fell within the interlayer.

The reconnaissance drone extended its light inside, illuminating a low passageway paved with old cable troughs.

There was no visible light over four hundred meters away, and the test pulses sent by the read-only probe still returned from the end of the darkness at fixed intervals.

The cable machine unloaded the large cable reel, bringing only a roll of thin optical fiber to follow behind the reconnaissance drone.

The two machines crawled into the interlayer one after the other, the communication fiber slowly lengthening from beneath the plug plate.

The interlayer had a supporting reinforcement ring every fifty meters; some cable trough covers had fallen off, yet the ground had no standing water, nor was any spreading contamination detected.

When passing the sixth reinforcement ring, the drone's right rear foot stepped on a cover plate and flipped it up.

It backed up to flatten the cover plate, waiting until the cable machine caught up behind it before moving forward again.

After walking the 417 meters, a half-open low door appeared in the lens view.

The cavity behind the door was only half the size of the OUTER CACHE-07 equipment bay, with three rows of metal slots arranged along the wall, most of the bays empty.

The sign directly facing the entrance still had two recognizable words left.

[OBS_ARCHIVE]

[MIRROR-07]

The innermost row of slots retained a passive optical path combiner; twenty-three of the twenty-four storage slots were empty, with only a palm-wide black data cartridge jammed in the very bottom.

The cartridge body had no power port nor active interface for receiving commands; the ablation-darkened optical readout window was its only entrance left to the outside world.

The cable machine supported the bottom of the data cartridge, successively releasing the mechanical locks on both sides, and sent it into the low-temperature sealed compartment of Box No. 17.

Thus, the fourth task obtained its first transportable data carrier.

When the Fifth Fleet returned along the original route, Jiang Lin was still sitting in front of the A-07 junction box.

The nine echo curves were spread out on the edge of the console, the screw box was moved to the ground, and the lunar farside calibration table still occupied the right screen.

The same serial number walked from the engineering archives of the lunar farside into Northeast Seventy-Three, and along the verification pulses of OR-MV-073-04 landed on this junction box, finally leading to the data cartridge at the end of the interlayer.

This chain of evidence did not cross any permissions not yet acquired.

After the low-temperature sealed compartment returned to the equipment bay, Jiang Lin set up a non-writable optical readout device inside the isolation hood.

The first scan yielded only patches of raw interference fringes.

He restored the clock marks and margin error-correction blocks according to the maintenance volume; two ablation damages consumed some marginal data, but the main index could still be expanded continuously.

The title of the first page appeared first.

[FDSO-2076 A/Joint Observation Source Re-grouping Record]

Beneath the index were densely arranged coordinates, epochs, and equipment numbers.

Looking solely at the graphics, the white markers scattered all the way from the vicinity of the Earth-Moon system to the edge of the heliosphere, truly resembling an observation network blanketing the Solar System.

Jiang Lin opened the equipment identity column, and the image quickly changed its appearance.

The same deep space probe passed through different locations in different years, with each valid epoch drawn as a separate marker, turning decades of trajectories into a long string of white dots.

The remaining sources were equally cluttered.

Solar probes contributed high-latitude particle and dust records, planetary missions handed over payloads originally used for navigation and environmental monitoring, the Earth-Moon system provided continuous observations, the Mars relay made up for the outer time difference, and several deep space probes that had long exceeded their design lifespans were responsible for the most distant sparse baselines.

Their development eras, mission objectives, sampling frequencies, and data formats varied widely.

Many devices had even been retired before the establishment of the joint mission, leaving only historical data capable of re-entering calculations.

The people in the archives borrowed every eye they could still find, unified the coordinates and time scales, and pieced together a joint result capable of constraining the direction of arrival, velocity, and major axis orientation.

All specialized mission serial numbers were later than the Dark Dust String early warnings, and earlier equipment archives still retained their original solar, planetary, navigation, or environmental missions.

It felt more like an unprecedented requisition of old items: those that could observe the sun continued to observe the sun, those that could count dust were reassigned to count dust, and devices that had already flown far enough didn't even need to be moved in position.

Jiang Lin traced back item by item along the index, and every valid pixel could find its corresponding original payload, observation epoch, and error range.

On the multi-source fusion page, a narrow, low-contrast structure emerged from the background, with a sparse precursor zone paved in front, while the main body behind exceeded the complete observation range of that time.

The records did not patch the missing parts into a pretty full-view picture.

It only provided the morphology and propagation window in areas where the evidence could be closed, keeping the rest gray.

The lower right corner of the page preserved the state at the very moment before the cataclysm.

[FDSO-2076 A/Multi-Source Stable Confirmation]

[Main Front Peak Window/Estimated 26 to 27 Years Later]

[Star Tide Preparation Engineering/Initiated]

The second page was an engineering deployment map.

Jiang Lin first saw a dense patch of green glowing in the Earth-Moon region.

Lunar farside observation, Earth-Moon communication, near-Earth transit, and peak-shaving facilities were uniformly categorized into the Earth-Moon defense engineering, with completion statuses ranging from trial operation to official service, but the main body already existed.

Near the Mars orbit, there was another solitary set of green nodes.

[Mars Relay Engineering/Put into Operation]

Further outward, a large number of planned positions were lined up sequentially across the main asteroid belt, Jupiter system, Saturn system, and the heliospheric boundary.

Most of them remained in gray.

[Outer Warning/Reuse Existing Scientific Equipment]

The asteroid belt forward nodes stopped at completed feasibility studies, and the outer engineering of Jupiter and Saturn remained in the proposal or resource stage.

[Outer Heliospheric Defense/Not Entered Construction]

The observation source layer could still extend all the way to the edge of the Solar System, yet the engineering actually newly built and put into operation stopped near Mars.

Jiang Lin split the two charts onto the left and right screens.

On the left was the joint observation temporarily pieced together from old probes and existing facilities spanning decades.

On the right was the actual completion status of the star tide preparation engineering.

He turned off the observation source layer on the left, and the periphery of the Solar System quickly darkened, leaving only the Earth-Moon region and the vicinity of Mars orbit with green.

Turning the observation source layer back on, those white dots belonging to old scientific missions crossed Jupiter and Neptune once more, extending toward the edge of the heliosphere along the trajectories of probes that had long since flown far away.

In the equipment identity column, not a single dedicated defense node beyond Mars orbit could be found; the so-called dense white dots were mostly just tracks left by the same batch of old probes across different epochs.

Once the Mars relay lost its forwarding capability, the Earth-Moon defense engineering would be left with only its final layer.

These two pages of MIRROR-07 could only prove where the engineering had completed, and could not answer alone why resources were cut off, why organizations collapsed, and why civilization lost its system capabilities a step earlier before the main front arrived.

He left these questions in the subsequent indices, writing the two recovered pages respectively into isolated storage.

The readout device was still scanning the data cartridge, with progress stalled at 11.6 percent, and a large portion of the catalog behind the ablation zone remained unexpanded.

Jiang Lin printed out the star tide preparation engineering deployment map and pasted it next to the Northeast Seventy-Three onsite structural diagram.

On one map, Northeast Seventy-Three and the sixteen partitions of the lunar farside engineering had already overlapped, while the Seventh Canopy Station still remained in the candidate column with a dashed line.

On the other map, the engineering nodes beyond Mars remained an entire expanse of unbuilt gray.