The dust cloud resolved into numbers an hour later.
Forty soldiers. Eight cultivators. Two officials in Bureau administrative robes riding at the center, protected, important.
And behind them, in a covered transport that moved too carefully for ordinary cargo, something that made every active white fire source in the fortress react simultaneously.
Xin felt it through the Chorus before he saw it.
A suppression device. Not a technique — a constructed object, built specifically for large-scale channel compression. The kind of thing that required months to build and significant resources to operate.
The Bureau had not sent a second unit to negotiate.
They had sent equipment.
"Wake everyone," Xin said to Mei. "Now."
She was already moving.
*****
The first unit commander came to Xin at
