Indeed, when Taville told me that at some second within the past 72 hours, our universe had flickered, I was still a bit panicked.
But soon, the fact that the World Tree was partly withering calmed me down.
It's like being able to face desertification with equanimity when confronted with 2012, or calmly accepting a fail in English when you've flunked every subject; when things were bad enough that the world's management terminals were restarting, whether the universe trembled for a second or had a fifteen-minute epilepsy fit was meaningless. The principle that 'lice are not itchy and debts are not worrisome when you have a lot of them' applies here—I just hadn't had the chance to escalate the World Tree malfunction to a strategic crisis level yet.
