Zephyr watched.
He'd been watching for two hundred and fifty-one years. The watching had changed — not in kind but in scale. In the beginning, he'd watched twenty-four people in a swamp. Now he watched a million. The attention was the same. The bandwidth was different.
The kingdom spread below his awareness like a circuit board — every node lit, every connection active, every system humming with the particular energy of a civilization that had been designed from scratch and had grown into something that exceeded its design without breaking its architecture. That was the achievement. Not the size. Not the power. The fact that it *worked*. That a system built for twenty-four could scale to a million, and the million produced outputs that the twenty-four could never have imagined.
He ran the review.
