With three superpowers at his fingertips, he could dominate the 1970s.

The day before departure, the equipment was delivered to Jiang Zhiyu's yard. There were twelve metal boxes in total, lined up in the yard.

Jiang Zhiyu unpacked and inventoried the items in front of the visitors. There were two SLR cameras, both top-of-the-line domestically produced, complete with wide-angle and telephoto lenses—quite heavy. The film rolls filled half the box, mostly black and white, with only a dozen or so rolls of color film, each individually wrapped in cotton paper—very precious. There was also a cinema camera, something only used for major news stories, along with its accompanying film. Underneath were a geological hammer, a steel shovel, a row of sampling bags, a bundle of test tubes, a thermometer, and a series of other necessary tools.

The staff officer delivering the equipment squatted next to the crate, rubbing his hands together, looking worried.

"Director Jiang, make sure the film roll is wound tightly when you load it, don't let it jam. If it jams, there's no way to fix it. There's only so much color film, so use it sparingly. Once the camera is wound up, you can only shoot thirty seconds at a time; you'll have to rewind it afterward. Remember that."

"Okay." Jiang Zhiyu picked up a camera and gestured with it. "Don't worry!"

She closed each box one by one, then with a wave of her hand, she stored them all in her spatial storage. The staff officer watched as the twelve boxes vanished into thin air, his lips twitching. This woman was no longer trying to hide anything. He quickly saluted her, then turned and left.

Seventeen flew out of the space and circled her twice.

"Host, host, when are we leaving?"

"Let's go now, to the west of the Marius Hills."

"Alright, host, you're ready. Let's go!"

……

Moon

With each step, Yuechen sank less than an inch into the ground. For ease of movement, Jiang Zhiyu had only connected to a five-meter spatial passage around herself. The silence was still there, and that same feeling of loneliness instantly washed over her.

Even though she had experienced it once before, Jiang Zhiyu was still stunned by the surrounding scene once again.

She stood there for a good ten seconds before suddenly snapping out of her daze and quickly taking her camera out of the storage space.

"Seventeen, seventeen, hold on to your business first, take a picture of me! I want to take a picture with the Earth!"

"Host, what's the rush? You're not a tourist." Seventeen sat on her shoulder, the rhombus-shaped core flashed with light, and landed on the ground.

"You don't understand." Jiang Zhiyu shoved the camera at Seventeen, then ran to a moon rock and stood there, deliberately leaving Earth behind her. "This photo will make Old Gao and the others drool. Hurry up and take it, I'll smile."

Seventeen held up his camera and snapped a picture.

"Finished filming. Host, you're smiling like an idiot."

"What do you know? This is called a historic smile." Jiang Zhiyu snatched the camera back, held it herself, and snapped several photos of the Earth overhead. She took black and white shots, then gritted her teeth and switched to color film. "This one has to be in color. The blue Earth against the black sky will be a complete waste of black and white film."

"You know, people on Earth have been looking up at the moon for thousands of years, writing poems and lyrics, but who could have imagined that looking back from the moon, Earth would look like this?"

Seventeen walked over to her, tilting her head to look up as well. "Honestly, host, you're quite pretty, prettier than the pictures in my database. Pictures are static, this is dynamic."

Jiang Zhiyu paused, glanced at it, and smiled.

"What's wrong?"

Seventeen paused, then pointed her small metal hand towards Earth. "I just think that with so many people living on that blue bead, it's a bit noisy, but it's really lively."

Jiang Zhiyu immediately took out the mountain identification map to compare it with. The mountain she was comparing it with was located slightly to the west overhead. The shape of the mountain shadow was exactly the same as the one drawn on the map. The low-angle sunlight made the mountain shadow look very long, with black and white interspersed, as if someone had carved it out on the moon with a giant knife.

"Host, the location is correct, less than two kilometers off." Seventeen's core light flickered. "Moon Creek is to the southeast, 1200 meters away."

"Alright, let's go find a cave."

Walking on the moon is an art, and Jiang Zhiyu fell in love with the feeling; it was novel. She took her usual steps, and suddenly she floated up, landing slowly, like walking on cotton. After a few dozen steps, she figured it out and decided she didn't need to walk anymore. She leaned slightly forward and hopped forward with each step, covering five or six meters in one go—fast and effortless. Seventeen hopped beside her, the little metal figure bouncing around on the lunar surface like a silver bead.

"Host, you're like a rabbit right now."

"What do you know? This is called the standard posture for walking on the moon." She was jumping around happily when she suddenly remembered something, "Tell the engineering team that everyone coming here from now on has to practice walking like this, otherwise they'll be unsteady on their feet and won't be able to get any work done."

She noticed the moon dust as she landed. It was fine and very dry. When she lifted her foot, the dust particles splashed up and didn't fall. They just hung in mid-air, drifting slowly for a while before dissipating.

"Seventeen, why isn't this soil falling down?"

"There's no air," Seventeen said. "On Earth, dust is carried by the wind, and it settles when the wind stops. There's no wind here, so the dust particles are lifted up by inertia and drift slowly. Host, be careful, this soil is very fine. It'll be a problem if it gets into the gaps in the equipment. From now on, the engineering team will have to wear dustproof clothes and shoes when they come up here."

"Okay, I'll make a note of it." She added a line to the notebook.

Moon Creek was just ahead. In the low-angle light, it looked like a winding black line embedded in the gray plain, sometimes wide and sometimes narrow, with traces of lava erosion still remaining on both banks.

Jiang Zhiyu walked along the stream, her eyes fixed on the ground on both sides, looking for the kind of thing the old geologist had mentioned: a collapsed skylight and dark spots that were different colors from the surrounding area.

After walking for about half an hour, Seventeen suddenly raised his hand.

"Host, to your right front, in the bend of the stream, there's a round one."

Jiang Zhiyu looked in the direction it pointed. Yuexi turned a corner, and sure enough, there was a circular crater on the ground inside the bend, darker than the surrounding soil, with a ring of collapsed rubble around its edge. Without careful observation, it would just look like a small impact crater, but it was too round, too perfectly round to be like a blow from nowhere; it looked more like an eye had appeared out of thin air in the ground.

Jiang Zhiyu's heart skipped a beat. She hopped over in a few steps, moved along the edge of the pit to a safe spot, lay down, and peered down. The pit walls were steep. First, there was a section of slope illuminated by sunlight, and then the light disappeared, leaving only darkness, like a bottomless well.

"It's a skylight." Her voice lowered unconsciously. "Seventeen, what do you think is down there?"

"Host, why don't you use your mental power to probe and find out?"

Jiang Zhiyu set up her camera. She used a wide-angle lens to capture the entire panorama of the pit opening, placing the scale within the frame; she used a telephoto lens to zoom in on the rock strata and piles of rubble on the pit walls; she even set up a movie camera and slowly panned it around the pit opening. She cocked the lens, and in thirty seconds, she took meticulous photos, capturing the pit opening, the Moon Creek, and the distant ring mountain, leaving nothing out.

"Why are you taking pictures of this? It's just a dark, crater-like hole," Seventeen wondered.

"You don't understand." Her eyes were glued to the viewfinder. "This crater will be the gateway to our lunar base. Can't we at least take a good first picture of that gateway?"

After filming enough, she put the camera away in the space.

"Go, get down."

With a thought, the person and the system had already landed at the bottom of the pit.

Beneath his feet lay soft, accumulated dust, and the halo of light above seemed as distant as the moon. The energy patterns on Seventeen's body lit up, and a soft light spread from his body, illuminating the surroundings.

Jiang Zhiyu looked up, gasped, and forgot to hold up her camera.

This is not a well; it is a grand palace buried inside the moon.

The space was so vast that it seemed to have no end, and the cave ceiling was so high that she had to strain her neck to barely see the curve. The entire cave wall was made of solidified lava, and the flowing patterns from years ago were all frozen in the stone, like solidified waves. When the sunlight shone on it, the patterns stretched into the depths of darkness, with no end in sight.

"Host, the camera," Seventeen whispered a reminder.

She then came to her senses and picked up her camera to take a series of pictures. The flash was useless in the cave, so she relied entirely on Seventeen as her "lamp." She moved inward as she took pictures, her steps very light.

"Don't worry," Seventeen said. "No one has been here for billions of years; we won't wake anyone."

"What do you know? This is called reverence."

He took the thermometer out and placed it on the stone, then picked it up to look at it after a while.

"Seventeen, minus twenty-one degrees Celsius."

"I finished sweeping a long time ago," Seventeen's voice was brimming with barely suppressed excitement. "The cave entrance has a long axis of 110 meters and a short axis of 80 meters. The thinnest part of the cave ceiling is still 35 meters thick. The cavern's depth has been explored up to 400 meters and we haven't reached the end yet. The average width is 60 meters, and the cave floor is flat. Underneath the accumulated dust is bedrock, which is very solid. Not to mention the temperature—the cave walls, the floor, and the air are all around minus 20 degrees Celsius, very stable."

As Jiang Zhiyu listened, she took notes in her notebook, her hand trembling slightly. A 35-meter-thick rock cover, a flat cave several hundred meters deep, constant temperature, located on the latitude of the terminator, on the near side of the moon, with direct communication links to Earth. This cave met all six conditions.

She stood at the bottom of the cave for a while and tried to call out.

"Why."

There was no echo. The sound was muffled by the close-fitting air, disappearing as soon as it went out.

"Why isn't there an answer?" she asked.

"Host, sound cannot travel within this range at all; sound can only be transmitted within a five-meter radius."

As Jiang Zhiyu listened, she couldn't help but imagine things further away. This dark, gaping hall would one day have lights, walls, doors, and corridors. Old men in white coats would walk back and forth here, carrying stones from the moon in their hands.

"What are you thinking about, host?"

"Thinking about the future." She snapped out of her reverie, turned a page in her notebook, and said, "Let's go, let's take a look inside."

She continued walking into the cave, taking pictures along the way. After walking about 400 meters, the path collapsed. Huge boulders completely blocked the way ahead, some as big as houses, one on top of another, blocking the path so much that there wasn't even a crack.

Seventeen flew to the pile of stones and paused for a moment, its core light flashing.

"Host, something's not right behind these rocks."

"What's wrong?"

"It's empty." Seventeen tilted his head. "Not the kind of emptiness that collapses out, but a particularly large and well-defined emptiness. And I vaguely sensed a kind of energy reaction, but it was blocked by the rock strata, so I can't quite put my finger on it."

Jiang Zhiyu stared at the pile of boulders blocking the road for two seconds, then reached out and wrote a line in his notebook: The end of the cave hall collapsed, there is a cavity behind the rock, to be investigated.

"Not digging?" Seventeen questions.

"No digging." Jiang Zhiyu closed her notebook. "Today's task is to guard the door, not to demolish the house. This space is so big, we can explore it slowly."

She paused, then added.

"Besides, what if Chang'e really lives inside? We should be polite when we meet for the first time."

Seventeen was silent for two seconds.

"Host, Chang'e was a character you made up."

"I know." Jiang Zhiyu stuffed the notebook back into her pocket, glanced up at the pile of dark, massive rocks, and said, "What if it's real?"