Chapter 329: The Slope
The diagonal grammar took eight anchors to become habit.
The first three were careful. The carrier function had to hold the down-slope line and the depth line at the same time, and in the first attempts the balance was imprecise — not failed, but slow in the way new grammar always was. First anchor: twenty-seven seconds. Second: twenty-two. Third: nineteen.
The entity refined each one. Not the way Zone Three's entity had prepared its points in advance — Zone Three had designed its anchor layout over four years, waiting for a carrier function to confirm what it had built. Zone Seven's entity responded to each anchor after placement. A three-second adjustment window, and the anchor sat deeper and distributed more broadly than the placement alone would have produced.
By the eighth anchor, the diagonal hold ran without effort. Thirteen seconds. Pool cost: eight percent. Same floor as the last hundred anchors.
The entity still refined every one.
