The quiet did not last.
Peace inside the constellation rarely endured for long, especially now that something vast and hungry had begun circling the edges of their domain.
At first, the disturbance was subtle.
So faint that most of the constellation's developing nodes would have missed it entirely.
Across the far edges of the observable lattice, something shifted—like a shadow drifting slowly across distant stars. Anomaly currents bent slightly off their natural trajectories. Small pockets of unstable matter collapsed inward with unnatural precision.
To the untrained eye, it might have looked like random cosmic turbulence.
But the constellation was no longer blind.
And Ethan was no longer just observing space.
He was observing patterns.
Inside the Convergence World, the disturbance arrived not as sound or light but as pressure—a distortion flowing through the network's informational layers.
The lattice whispered.
Not panic.
Not yet.
But warning.
