The WEAVER credentials unlocked a new layer of the Versity. Kaelen's tablet now displayed an interstitial map overlay, the scattered red and amber nodes glowing like infections in the system's body. His new workshop wasn't in any district. Following the coordinates, he used his debug sigil to open a portal to a place that existed between.
The Interstitial Workshop was a bubble of stable reality anchored in the grey nowhere. It was a spherical room about fifty feet across, its curved walls displaying a slow, mesmerizing flow of the probabilistic fog outside. The floor was a smooth, white composite. In the center sat a console and workbench far more advanced than anything he'd scavenged. On one side, a materializer hummed, capable of fabricating basic components from raw energy and data. On the other, a resonance chamber allowed for safe testing of frequencies. Shelves held organized bins of materials—spirit-crystals, conductive alloys, data-crystals.
It was a pristine, sterile lab. It felt nothing like his cluttered berth. It felt like a hospital operating room for reality itself.
His first task was to build a tool to see the web. The Council's map showed nodes, but the connections were theoretical, inferred. He needed to detect the actual resonant threads passing through the interstitial medium.
He called it the Interstitial Tracer. The core was a sensor array tuned to the "noise" of the grey expanse—the half-formed thoughts and probabilities. His hypothesis was that a resonant link between two anomalies would create a path of less noise, a coherent channel through the chaos. By mapping areas of abnormal coherence in the interstitial static, he could trace the threads.
It took two cycles of intense work in the silent lab. He integrated a spatial scanner from a salvaged cartography drone, a psychic resonance dampener (reverse-engineered from his Static Shard), and a high-speed analysis processor. The final device was a disc the size of a dinner plate, covered in crystalline sensors, that would float and map.
He initialized the Tracer in the center of the workshop. It hummed to life, rose into the air, and began a slow rotation. A holographic sphere projected around it, initially a uniform grey fuzz of static.
Then, lines began to appear.
Faint, shimmering threads of slightly ordered light, extending from the workshop's location and fading into the walls, heading toward the nodes on the map. They were there. Dozens of them, a faint, ghostly cat's cradle connecting points of instability across the Versity. The web was real.
He focused the Tracer on the strongest thread—one that pulsed a sickly green and connected the red node in Sub-Basement 7 (the Anomalous Materials cell) to an amber node in the Celestial Peak's Root-Farm Silo 9 (the site of the earlier nutrient-dispersion failures).
He needed to see this link up close. To understand its nature.
Using the WEAVER clearance, he requested a micro-portal aperture—a temporary, pinprick opening in reality just large enough to send a sensor probe through the interstitial medium along the thread's path. The system, after a security delay, approved.
A point of light appeared in the air of the workshop. He guided the Tracer's secondary probe—a needle-like sensor on a filament—into the aperture.
The feed that came back was not visual. It was resonant data, translated into sound and waveform. He heard the "voice" of the link.
It was a duet of despair. From the Sub-Basement 7 node, he heard the amplified, distorted echoes of the artifacts—the Mourner's Core's grief, the helmet's whisper, the unstable core's hum of imminent collapse. From the Root-Farm node, he heard the resonant "hunger" of the parasitic entity he'd identified, a silent scream for the energy it consumed.
And in the middle, where their frequencies met and braided in the grey, he heard something new. A third resonance, emerging from the interaction. A slow, grinding frequency of Entropic Sympathy. The two miseries were resonating together, creating a new, more stable pattern of decay. They were making each other stronger.
This wasn't just a link. It was a circuit. A self-reinforcing loop of dysfunction.
He pulled the probe back, his mind racing. Severing this link wouldn't be enough. If he just cut it, both nodes might destabilize further, seeking new connections, potentially creating more volatile links. He needed to… insulate them. Put a resonant buffer on each end that would absorb the specific frequency of the other, preventing the harmonic lock.
It was a diplomatic solution. Not a severance, but a non-aggression pact enforced by psychic baffles.
He designed the Resonance Isolator—a small device that would attach to an anomaly site, analyze any outgoing sympathetic frequencies, and generate a precise damping field to neutralize only that specific outgoing signal. It would leave the anomaly's own internal resonance untouched but make it "invisible" to its linked partner.
He built two prototypes. Then, he went to work.
First, the Root-Farm Silo 9. The Celestial Peak farm manager, a harried dryad named Liron, was relieved to see him. "The dispensation runes fail every nine days like clockwork now! The seedlings are stunted!"
Kaelen scanned the silo. The parasitic entity was a faint, clinging resonance in the old wooden beams, feeding on the growth-energy. It was also broadcasting its hungry frequency into the interstitial medium, straight toward Sub-Basement 7. He attached the Isolator to a central beam. It synced, analyzed the parasitic frequency, and began emitting a subtle counter-wave that canceled the broadcast. The parasite was still there, still hungry, but now its cry was contained.
"The link is broken," Kaelen told Liron. "The runes should stabilize. You'll still need to eventually purge the parasite, but it won't be amplified by external misery."
Next, Sub-Basement 7. Vik'nar was present, monitoring. Kaelen attached the second Isolator to the stasis field generator, focused on the artifacts' collective despair-frequency. The device hummed, and the moaning helmet's sound, which had begun to pick up again, faded back to its original whisper. The sympathetic pull toward the root-farm parasite ceased.
"Link neutralized," Kaelen reported.
Vik'nar checked the logs. "Resonant bleed into the interstitial medium has decreased by 94%. Acceptable."
Back in the Interstitial Workshop, Kaelen checked the Tracer's map. The sickly green thread connecting the two nodes had faded to near-invisibility. The nodes themselves still glowed, but they were no longer in active conversation.
Success.
He spent the next several cycles systematically working through the web. He became a therapist for broken places. He insulated a weeping, haunted fountain in the Spire's lower cloisters from a crackling, angry forge in the Engine's scrap-yards. He deafened a cluster of melancholy memory-crystals to the frantic, lost resonance of a malfunctioning teleportation pad.
Each fix was a small, precise intervention. He wasn't curing the diseases, just stopping them from spreading their symptoms to each other. It was containment. Public health for reality.
The work was isolating. The lab was silent but for the hum of machines and the whisper of the grey outside. He missed the chaotic, organic presence of Zyx, the grim reality of the Null Quarter. This felt too clean, too removed.
After the seventh successful isolation, a new message appeared on his console, not from the Council, but from the workshop's own log.
[OBSERVATION: PATTERN DETECTED IN ISOLATED NODES.]
[ANALYSIS: WHILE SYMPATHETIC LINKS ARE NEUTRALIZED, NODAL RESONANCE AMPLITUDE SHOWS AVERAGE INCREASE OF 5.2% POST-ISOLATION.]
The anomalies, cut off from their sympathetic partners, were getting stronger internally. They were turning their energy inward.
It made sense. The resonant energy had to go somewhere. If it couldn't broadcast out, it would reverberate internally, potentially making the local problem worse over time. His isolators were containing a leak by increasing the pressure in the pipe.
He needed a way to safely bleed off that resonant energy. A pressure valve.
He was pondering this when the workshop's primary portal shimmered. A figure stepped through. Not an auditor or a council member.
It was Lyra of the Shattered Sun.
She looked different from the proud, flame-haired warrior he'd glimpsed in the arrival plaza. Her hair still burned, but with a lower, more controlled intensity. She wore practical, scorched leathers and carried a long, wrapped object on her back. Her face was sharper, her eyes holding a tired ferocity. She scanned the sterile lab with clear disdain, her gaze finally landing on him.
"You are DEBUG? The resonance fixer?" Her voice was like embers grinding together.
"Kaelen. And you're Lyra. From the Spire of Thaum."
"I was. Now I am assigned to Reclamation and Threat Assessment. My team handles… physical manifestations of system failures." She unwrapped the object on her back. It was a broken spear shaft, the head missing, but the fractured wood glowed with a violent, unstable red light. "We recovered this from a Fractured Realm that collapsed during a salvage op. It's… angry. It sings a song of betrayal and fire that disrupts any energy field within twenty paces. Our mages cannot calm it. Our engineers cannot contain it. One of the Council liaisons suggested you deal with 'singing things.' So. Deal with it."
She placed the broken spear on his workbench. The moment it left her hands, the workshop's ambient lights flickered. A low, furious thrumming filled the air, and the temperature rose several degrees. The spear's song was a physical force—a weaponized dirge.
This wasn't a subtle anomaly. This was a screaming, active threat. And it was now in his sterile lab.
The Weaver's job had just gotten a lot more hands-on.