The Hollow hit the fortress like a wave hitting a cliff.
Not physical. Energetic — a pressure that came through the ley lines and the walls simultaneously, filling the chamber the way cold fills a room when a window breaks. Everyone felt it. Three people staggered. Pol grabbed the junction point marker beside him to stay upright.
The Hollow was enormous.
Xin had felt it in the network at distance and understood it was old and large. In the chamber with twenty-three active sources drawing it in at close range, enormous was an understatement. It pressed against the Chorus the way the ocean presses against a boat — not malicious, not personal, just vast and indifferent and completely capable of ending everything present.
The convergence point held.
Barely.
"Output steady," Chen Wei said
