CHAPTER 204
### What The Hollow Did
Wang Fei's message arrived at the third hour of the night.
He read it in the dark.
*I am at the hollow.*
*I have been here for three days reading the sections surrounding it.*
*Something has changed.*
*The continuous frequency in the lower layer — the one Li Shan documented as the source of the between quality's propagation — it has changed character.*
*Not the intensity. The direction.*
*The frequency was conducting outward through the network. Horizontal propagation. Moving away from the source in all directions.*
*For the past two days the frequency is also conducting vertically.*
*Not away from the source.*
*Into it.*
*Deeper into the lower layer.*
*The hollow is conducting its own frequency deeper into itself.*
He read this message.
He sat up.
He extended the domain.
The hollow was ninety li northeast. At undocumented stage full capacity he could feel the continuous frequency through the conducting bridges of the generating sections.
He read.
Wang Fei was right.
The direction had changed.
The horizontal propagation was still present. The between quality conducting outward through the network, thirty-five percent above baseline, feeding the developing sections.
But there was a vertical component now.
The source was deepening itself.
He reached for the thread.
The thin connection he had maintained during the faction's approach — released after Rong Yan sat at the hollow's edge.
He tried to reestablish it.
The thread formed.
At ninety li.
He read the hollow through it.
The vertical direction was clear.
The hollow's continuous frequency was not just conducting outward through the network.
It was reading itself. The frequency was moving into the lower layer, deeper than before, and what it found there was —
He held the thread.
He held eighteen breaths.
He kept going.
Nineteen. Twenty.
He reached.
Something in the hollow's lower layer was responding to the contact.
Not the continuous frequency responding to his thread.
Something below the continuous frequency.
Something that the thread's contact was drawing upward.
Something older.
He held the thread.
He held twenty breaths.
He tried twenty-one.
Twenty-one arrived.
The thread reached.
The hollow reached back.
Not the way the between recognized the wielder.
Not the recognition brightness of the formation site.
Something different.
Something that had no name yet.
He released the thread.
He sat in the dark of the western road camp.
He looked at the grey blade.
At the ordinary grey metal.
At the between quality invisible because it was everything.
He sent one message.
To Li Shan. To Wang Fei. To Mo Xuan. To Shen Bo.
To everyone who had contributed to the One Continuous Project.
*The hollow is responding to the propagation it has been producing.*
*The source is deepening.*
*I do not know what is there.*
*I am going to the hollow.*
He looked at Lin Mei.
She was awake.
She had been awake since his domain extension.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
He could not read her expression.
He looked at her face without trying.
"Yes," she said.
Before he asked.
"Yes," he said.
He picked up his pack.
The road turned northeast.