Once We Lived in Nanjing

The relay satellite took on the role of a data bridge, with Reconnaissance Star transmitting all data back to it for storage and signal modulation.

The relay satellite then sends the modulated signal back to the ground, received by the Yagi Antenna on Ban Xia's rooftop.

After the Yagi Antenna receives the signal, it is transmitted to the 725 amateur radio station, which then sends the data back to modern times.

The signal returned to the year 2019 is stored in multiple backups and simultaneously decoded—if the decoding is successful and results in a clear, identifiable photo, then the test is successful.

What would be the subject of the photo used for the test?

Everyone, without prior agreement or discussion, chose No. 66 on Muxuyuan Street in Qinhuai District.

Meihua Villa.

The first photo transmitted back from twenty years in the future, used to test the entire system, is a high-altitude overhead view of Meihua Villa during the doomsday period.

Bai Zhen's palms started sweating.

Zhao Bowen also sweated.

Everyone present was tense, as if waiting for news of the Mars lander's landing. The lander went out of contact before landing; it had to survive the perilous five minutes unattended. At that time, the command center and the current headquarters looked exactly alike—nobody knew whether it would succeed, even though the chances were faint. If one link in the chain went wrong, it was all lost.

It would all have been in vain—a waste of immense manpower, resources, and most precious, time.

The headquarters was completely silent, utterly still.

"Is there a satellite signal?" Wang Ning asked quietly.

Zhao Bowen sat on the sofa with headphones on, staring at the computer screen. Judging whether there was a satellite signal was simple—it was all about whether there was noise, as the relay satellite transmitted the image data as audio, which sounded like static and crackling to human ears.

"Is there a satellite signal?" Wang Ning asked again.

"Yes!" Bai Zhen suddenly exclaimed, covering his headphones tightly, "There's sound!"

Everyone was startled.

"Did it work?" Wang Ning was thrilled.

"Don't celebrate too early; there is a signal... but it's very weak, maybe because the antenna direction isn't correctly aligned. Look at this signal, it's almost like it's about to drop off." Zhao Bowen frowned tightly, pointing at the oscillating line on the oscilloscope, "Yangyang! When is our next scheduled voice communication?"

"Ten minutes!"

"During the next voice communication, have her slightly adjust the antenna direction! A small adjustment will do!"

On their second voice communication, Bai Yang directed Ban Xia to make a minor adjustment to the Yagi Antenna's direction, but no one knew which direction was the correct one, so Ban Xia had to rely on intuition to slightly shift left and right.

After the adjustment, the signal was completely lost; Bai Yang knew she had turned it the wrong way.

The headquarters had no choice but to sit and wait for ten minutes until the third voice communication, to have her switch to a different direction.

This behavior was no different than slapping a broken television. If slapping one side didn't work, one slaps the other side; one side would eventually work, and this time Ban Xia's adjustment did the trick.

"There is!"

"We got an image!"

"We got an image!"

The image slowly began to refresh on the computer screen; it was the test image, also Reconnaissance Star's first photograph taken after orbiting. If it could completely load, this would prove that Heng and Ha could operate normally, and thus the first phase of East Red Action would be declared a success. Zhao Bowen's breathing noticeably quickened as he leaned forward, resting his hands on the coffee table, both fists clenched tightly.

The effect was much like during the dial-up Internet era when opening a web page; the image slowly loaded bit by bit.

The image that gradually appeared before everyone's eyes was a black-and-white photo, full of snowy noise points and of quite poor image quality, but the people could still make out what the satellite had captured—a tiny square representing a rooftop, evenly distributed like chess pieces among lush vegetation. The layout of the residential buildings was familiar to them; this was Meihua Villa, half of the Meihua Villa community. Bai Yang sat in her room, staring at the screen image for a long time, unable to speak.

Everyone knew she lived twenty years in the future, but this was their first real glimpse at that already devastated world.

"My goodness."

Someone murmured in astonishment.

"Look," Wang Ning suddenly jolted, "look there!"

Zhao Bowen's gaze followed the direction Wang Ning pointed, paused for a moment, his eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses widened. Zhao's previously furrowed brows now suddenly relaxed.

He didn't know what expression to use, but a smile was uncontrollable.

The people in the command center were all stunned; Wang Ning was also smiling, but as he smiled, his eyes began to redden.

"She's talking to us," Bai Zhen murmured.

At this moment, in various institutions, departments, and command levels, everyone who was looking at this photo noticed that—

It was a tiny greeting.

A small "Hi".

In an inconspicuous corner of the photo, on a lawn at Meihua Villa, the word was formed with stones, bricks, and concrete. With synthetic aperture radar beamforming imaging mode having the highest resolution of one meter, the word in the one-meter resolution photo was less than a centimeter long, but its actual area covered dozens of square meters. Everyone knew who left it, but the girl had never mentioned it to anyone.

Unbeknownst to them, she quietly assembled a huge word on the ground using bricks and stones.