Within forty-eight hours of the safer-method release, seven new low-level stable fields came online across mixed and velocity-edge districts. None of them carried any authorization from the original Velocity-19 cluster.
Most were small—four or five people holding a patch of ground, damping residual pressure just enough to keep the Weave from folding back in. Two were already larger than the crew chief preferred. She watched the feeds in silence while the numbers climbed.
One of the new groups had set up near a secondary supply corridor. They began turning people away. The test they used was short and practical: walk the edge of their field under residual load for a fixed interval, hold the damping without spiking the pressure, and answer three questions about the last collapse they had seen.
Fail any part and you were sent back down the line. They posted the criteria on the open feeds without asking anyone.
