CHAPTER 173
### Three Days Fast
Three days in two.
Not by cultivation. By pace.
Twelve hours a day moving east. The specific pace of people who understood the distance and the timeline and had made a decision about the tradeoff between speed and sustainability.
The domain read the faction's movement continuously.
Still south. Still on schedule for seven days.
He read the two sections at range from the second day.
Sixty-three and seventy-one percent.
Both receiving Li Shan's passive pattern-reading contribution from the formation site.
Both building.
Not fast enough.
He reached the first section on the afternoon of the second day.
Sixty-three percent.
He stood at the section's edge and read its development character.
A farming community. Six families. The section was adjacent to their primary cultivation plot. Morning exercises — the specific routine he had learned to read as a grandmother's transmission. This grandmother was still alive. Seventy-two. She practiced every morning.
He could feel her frequency in the section's pathways.
She was there every morning at dawn.
He extended the application from all three directions simultaneously.
He calibrated to the grandmother's specific frequency.
He applied.
The section responded immediately.
Not the seeded section's gradual development response.
The undocumented stage calibrated application finding the grandmother's frequency as the alignment point and building from there.
The development rate tripled.
Then quadrupled.
Then settled at four point three times the standard passive contribution rate.
He held the application.
Eighteen breaths.
He held them.
Lin Mei was reading.
"The development rate," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"It is accelerating beyond the eleven-section simultaneous application rate," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"The calibration is more precise," she said. "The grandmother's specific frequency. You are not applying a standard between quality to the section. You are applying the grandmother's frequency amplified through the between quality."
"Yes," he said.
"The section is growing toward what it already is," she said.
"Yes," he said.
He held the application.
Bing Xi read.
"At this rate," she said. "Sixty-three percent to threshold in four days."
Four days for the first section.
He looked at the second section.
Three li east.
He would need to divide his time.
Two days with the first section.
Two days with the second.
Then the sections would be generating and Li Shan's reach could extend through them to the hollow.
And the hollow's continuous frequency would be accessible from the formation site.
And they could monitor and respond to the faction's approach.
If the timeline held.
"Li Shan," he said.
"Reading from the formation site," Li Shan said through the relay. "The development acceleration is visible in the cascade data."
"The second section," Jian Yu said.
"Seventy-one percent," Li Shan said. "Closer to threshold. At the application rate you are producing — two and a half days."
"Two days for the first," Jian Yu said. "Two days for the second."
"Four days total," Li Shan said. "Three days before the faction's expected arrival."
"Three days of margin," Jian Yu said.
"Yes," Li Shan said.
Three days of margin.
He looked at the section.
At the grandmother's frequency in the pathways.
At eighteen breaths.
At the grey blade.
He committed.
He applied.
He worked.
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