Chapter 304: Second Fragment
Day Three of Zone One opened cold.
Kai started before light. The zone's outer anchors were already active — twenty-two contact points warm in the highland stone, each one pushing a steady low signal to the surface above it. He could feel them through the ground before he sat down and held the carrier function still.
He went in at the morning's first hour.
The core architecture began around the fortieth position.
He had worked inward across two days, and he had felt the change in the rock coming — a gradual increase in organization, each anchor point slightly more deliberate than the last. But at anchor thirty-nine, the character of the stone shifted fully.
