The attack did not come from the fleets. It came from reality itself.
It began with small, localized paradoxes in the Sanctuary. A cup of water would be both full and empty. A door would lead to the room it was already in. The Starlight Pomegranate tree would be seen simultaneously budding, fruiting, and withering.
These were not hallucinations. Mira confirmed it—local reality laws were becoming unstable.
"It's the Design," Orion warned, his light flickering with fear. "It cannot directly attack a Synthesis point without risking empowering it. So it attacks the context. It is injecting self-contradictory logical loops into our local space-time. If it continues, the paradoxes will escalate until this pocket of reality… unwrites itself."
This was a new kind of warfare. One they couldn't fight with claws or plasma.
The only way to stabilize reality was to reinforce it with a consistent, unifying principle. With Synthesis.
Echo had to practice his power not on life, but on the fabric of existence itself. He had to become a living anchor of harmony in the middle of a storm of contradiction.
He sat in the grove, his Circle around him, their Quint-Bond flaring. He extended his will, not through his bloodline, but through his Sovereign Authority—the right to define his domain.
A paradox manifested before him: a crystal that was both heating and cooling, its state uncertain. Echo didn't fight it. He embraced both truths, then gently nudged them. You are heating. And you have cooled. These are not the same moment. You are heating now.
He imposed a tiny, logical sequence on the chaos. The crystal stabilized, becoming simply hot.
It was excruciatingly difficult, like rewriting the source code of the universe one line at a time. Each paradox resolved drained him. But with each success, the Sanctuary grew more stable, and his understanding of Synthesis deepened from a biological to a cosmic principle.
[ Sanguis Imperator – Stage 2 Progress: 40% ]
[ New Understanding: Reality-Weaving (Conceptual) – Can now slowly reinforce or gently reshape local reality laws by imposing sovereign consensus. Highly taxing. ]
[ The Sanctuary Seed responds: The living ark recognizes the harmonizing influence. Its own reality-stabilizing fields strengthen, forming a symbiotic relationship with Echo's power. ]
They had weathered the Design's first indirect assault. But it was a warning. The Design could attack the very ground beneath their feet. Their safe haven was only as safe as Echo's will could make it.