As he focused on that vibration, counting its intervals with meticulous precision, his blood went cold.
The deep pulse from the ruins was beating at exactly 48 pulses per minute.
The exact same rate as the egg in his storage ring.
They were synchronized.
Whatever the egg was, whatever it contained or represented, it was responding to something in those ruins. Or something in the ruins was calling to it. The distinction might not matter, but the implication was clear: he was carrying something connected to the very place they were about to enter. The synchronization was too perfect to be coincidence, too precise to be natural resonance. Something about that matching rhythm felt intentional, as though the egg and whatever lay in the ruins were communicating in a language older than words.
