Chapter 283: Node Guardian
Anchor eight sat at thirty-one meters.
Kai had been inside the entity's field for two hours, moving through the organized rock layer by layer. The deeper anchor points were harder to read — not because the entity's grammar changed, but because everything tightened toward the archive. The field architecture pressed closer to the center the deeper he went, the way a place built to hold something carefully grew denser near what it was holding.
He found the anchor point at thirty-one meters, ran the frequency match, and started the integration.
The dual-signal was clear now. By the eighth anchor he had stopped thinking of it as two separate things — rock frequency first, archive signal second, both locking at the moment of seat. The carrier function read them together, the way it eventually read any familiar pattern.
He was three minutes into the anchor-setting when something moved.
