"Closed system," Gao Jun said. He was pacing. Lin Feng had never seen him pace. "The division's theoretical framework for the conduit network is built on a closed-system assumption. Three centuries of research, every model, every projection, every analysis of pre-Abandonment infrastructure, all of it starts from the premise that the mortal realm's conduit network is self-contained. Energy generated internally, distributed internally, consumed internally. No external inputs. No external outputs."
He stopped pacing. Picked up his rod. Set it down again.
"An external connection changes everything."
Lin Feng sat on the diagnostic platform with his splinted arm resting on his knee and his ribs sending periodic reports through his template. The amber pillar ran its passive scan. His routing sense was still connected to the monitoring infrastructure, still tracking the three remaining beast signatures converging from their respective directions.
"The communication data in the pillars," he said. "Dr. Lian's message said the residual patterns showed active communication. Not passive leakage, not residual energy from a dead connection. Active. How old?"
"She didn't specify. But the implication is that the patterns are consistent with ongoing activity, not historical artifacts." Gao Jun finally picked up his rod and held it. Not spinning. "The division's overlay analysis can date formation-frequency residue to within a few decades for patterns of this age. If the communication was pre-Abandonment, the dating would show ten-thousand-year-old residue. If the dating shows something newer..."
He didn't finish the sentence.
Lin Feng reached into the substrate.
*Old Ghost.*
The distributed presence was there. Thin at Hub Fourteen-Northeast, as always, but present. Lin Feng could feel the formation-frequency signature in the conduit lines, the background resonance that indicated the ancient consciousness was attending.
*The pillars at Hub Seven-West. The division found communication patterns. External connection, outside the mortal realm's conduit boundary.*
The substrate carried nothing.
Not silence, exactly. Silence in the conduit network had a specific quality: the absence of signal, the background hum of infrastructure running without anyone using it. This was different. This was the quality of someone who was present, who had received the communication, and who was choosing not to respond.
*You knew about this.*
Nothing.
*The pillars were active during my development sessions. Twenty-five days of six-pillar work. If they were communicating with something external the entire time—*
Nothing. The substrate hummed with cascade energy and the steady pulse of activated conduit lines and the absolute absence of a response from the presence that lived in those lines.
Lin Feng held the contact for thirty seconds. Then he released it.
"He's not answering," he told Gao Jun.
The analyst looked at him. "Old Ghost?"
"I asked about the external connection. He went quiet." Lin Feng paused. "Not the thin-conduit quiet. Not bandwidth limitations. He chose not to respond."
Gao Jun's rod rotated once. "In four years of Barrens research, the division has documented seven instances of the substrate presence responding to environmental stimuli. The response pattern was consistent: oblique, partial, structured as questions rather than answers. The presence never refused to engage." He paused. "If this is the first refusal, that's a data point."
"A data point that says what?"
"That whatever the external connection is, Old Ghost doesn't want you to know about it. Or doesn't want to be the one to tell you." The rod spun again. "Those are different things."
Lin Feng filed that distinction and moved to the immediate problem.
"The closest beast."
Gao Jun checked the overlay. "Three point eight kilometers northwest. Bearing unchanged. Speed has increased slightly in the last twenty minutes. Estimated arrival at the hub's surface perimeter: three hours, forty minutes." He pulled up the full tracking display. "Second beast: eleven kilometers east-southeast. Third beast: sixteen kilometers northeast. The convergence window has tightened. All three signatures will reach the hub's perimeter within a seven-hour window."
Three hours and forty minutes for the first. Lin Feng's template at forty-eight point three percent, his left arm splinted, his ribs cracked, his buffer still holding unprocessed corrupted energy.
He could not fight another beast right now.
"If I'm drawing them," he said, "then I need to stop drawing them."
"Your template signature is the beacon. That's what Old Ghost's explanation suggested, and the tracking data is consistent. The beasts are following a formation-frequency signal that originates from your template's output. If you reduce the output—"
"I go dark." Lin Feng had been thinking about this since the walk back. The direct conduit interface generated formation-frequency output as a function of its operation. Reading the network, interpreting monitoring data, communicating through the substrate, all of it produced a signal. His template at forty-eight percent efficiency, connected to the conduit infrastructure, broadcast his position through every activated conduit line in the region.
"Can you reduce the output without losing functionality?"
"No." He'd tested this on the walk. "The direct conduit interface operates at a threshold. Below the threshold, the routing sense doesn't function. The monitoring access doesn't function. The substrate communication doesn't function. It's not a volume dial. It's a switch. On generates the signal. Off generates nothing."
Gao Jun was quiet for a moment.
"Then you lose everything," he said. "Routing sense. Network reading. Monitoring interpretation. The ability to track the beasts, to communicate with Old Ghost, to read the conduit infrastructure. All of it."
"The monitoring sensors still operate independently. They're infrastructure, not dependent on my interface. You can read them through the overlay's passive feed."
"At a fraction of the resolution your routing sense provides. The overlay reads formation-frequency data through instrumental measurement. Your routing sense reads it through direct perception. The difference in information quality is—"
"Significant. I know." Lin Feng looked at the amber pillar. "But the alternative is sitting here broadcasting my location to every corrupted beast in the activation zone while my template recovers from the last fight."
The analyst processed this for a long time. His rod spun slow and deliberate. The probability model wasn't giving him answers he liked.
"Go dark," he said. "I'll monitor through the overlay. If anything changes, if the beasts don't respond to the signal reduction, I wake you."
"I won't be sleeping."
"The buffer?"
"The buffer." Lin Feng positioned himself on the diagnostic platform, cross-legged, his splinted arm resting on his left knee. The cracked ribs made the position uncomfortable but stable. "While the interface is off, I can work the corrupted patterns. Internal template work doesn't generate external signal. It's contained."
"You're sure about that?"
He was not sure about that. Old Ghost might have been able to tell him whether internal pattern-breaking work generated detectable formation-frequency output. Old Ghost was not answering questions.
"Reasonably," he said.
Gao Jun accepted this with the expression of a man who had learned to work with reasonable certainties in a field where absolutes didn't exist.
Lin Feng closed his direct conduit interface.
The sensation was like going deaf. The constant background of the conduit network, the hum of activated infrastructure, the monitoring sensor feeds, the distributed presence of Old Ghost in the substrate, all of it disappeared. His routing sense went from a three-dimensional map of the formation-frequency environment to nothing. The single amber pillar's passive scan continued, but without his interface to interpret it, the data it generated was just light and vibration, meaningless to anything except the overlay's instrumental analysis.
He was blind. Disconnected from the network that had become his primary sense over the past twelve months.
His template output dropped to its passive minimum. The formation-frequency architecture still existed, still operated, but without the interface driving it, the external signal it generated fell to the level of any other living body's background formation-frequency presence. Undetectable at a distance. Invisible to corrupted beasts that were calibrated to track the Devourer-class signal of an active conduit interface.
"The northwest beast," Gao Jun said. He had the overlay running. "Still tracking... still at current bearing... speed unchanged..."
Lin Feng waited. Without the routing sense, he couldn't read the beast's signature himself. He was dependent on Gao Jun's overlay, on the analyst's instrumental measurements, on someone else's interpretation of data he would normally have read directly.
"Speed decreasing." Gao Jun's voice was careful. Measured. "The northwest beast is slowing. Bearing... bearing is drifting. It's turning. West-northwest now, away from the direct approach." A pause. "It's circling."
"Still moving toward the hub?"
"No. The direct approach has stopped. It's moving laterally. West-northwest at reduced speed, approximately forty percent of its previous approach velocity." He checked the overlay again. "The signal reduction worked. The beacon is dim enough that the beast has lost the direct track."
"But it's not leaving."
"No. It's transitioning to territorial search behavior. The division's survey data on corrupted beast hunting patterns documents this: when a tracked signal is lost, the beast defaults to area searching in the last known signal region. It circles, spiraling outward from the point where the track was lost, until it either reacquires the signal or exhausts its search radius."
"Search radius?"
"For a beast of this classification, the division's data suggests eight to twelve kilometers." He looked up from the overlay. "The hub is well within that range."
Good. Not good. The beast had lost the direct track, but it was still hunting in the area. If Lin Feng reactivated his interface, the beacon would reignite and the beast would reacquire instantly.
He was stuck in the dark.
"I'm going into the buffer," he said. "Don't disturb me unless the beast's behavior changes or one of the other signatures reaches this search radius."
Gao Jun nodded and settled into the workbench position with his overlay, the rod in his right hand, the monitoring feed running on the portable display. His own independent process: data analysis, documentation, the work that existed whether Lin Feng was in the room or not. He'd been doing this kind of fieldwork for four years before Lin Feng had entered the Barrens. He'd continue doing it regardless.
Lin Feng turned inward.
The buffer sat in his template's architecture like a sealed room. The isolation walls held, the integration cycle maintaining them automatically, but the corrupted patterns inside pressed against the boundaries with their steady, mindless insistence. More of them had reassembled during the walk back. The thirty-one he'd broken on the return trip had stayed broken, the freed energy already processed by the integration cycle, but the remaining patterns had used the time to rebuild their configurations.
He started with the deepest layer.
The corrupted cycling loops in the buffer had a hierarchy. The surface patterns, the ones he'd broken first during the walk, were relatively simple: single-loop configurations, one cycling circuit, one junction point. Below those, the patterns grew more complex. Multi-loop configurations. Cycling circuits that interlocked, sharing junction points, reinforcing each other's structural memory.
He found a double-loop pattern. Two cycling circuits sharing a junction at the overlap point. Breaking one loop destabilized the junction but the second loop maintained it, and the first loop rebuilt from the surviving junction's memory.
He had to break both simultaneously.
His template's architecture could apply targeted interference at a single point with precision. Two points simultaneously required splitting his attention, directing formation-frequency output to two locations within the buffer at the same time. The relay node's processing capacity could handle the split, but barely. His efficiency dropped a fraction as the processing load increased.
He broke the double loop. The junction collapsed. Both cycling circuits scattered into raw energy. His integration cycle processed the freed medium.
*Template efficiency: 48.9%.*
Rising. Slowly, point by point, each broken pattern releasing its energy for integration. The beast's formation-frequency medium, once stripped of its corrupted organization, was usable. Compatible with his architecture in a way that the corrupted patterns had obscured.
He found a triple-loop pattern and broke it.
Then a quadruple.
Time passed without external markers. Without the routing sense, without the conduit network's constant flow of data, the only clock was his template's efficiency reading and the steady work of breaking patterns, processing energy, climbing.
*Template efficiency: 50.1%.*
He'd crossed back above fifty. The consumed beast energy was beginning to make a real contribution, each broken pattern adding its formation-frequency medium to the reservoir his template drew from. The integration cycle was running faster now, the processing load distributed more efficiently as the buffer's contents decreased and the freed energy gave the cycle more operational capacity.
*Template efficiency: 51.4%.*
He was reaching the deeper patterns. The oldest corrupted configurations, built from decades of the wolf's existence in the Barrens' residual radiation, their cycling loops layered six and seven deep, each layer reinforcing the ones below it. Breaking these required sustained concentration and precise multi-point interference that taxed his template's processing capacity to its limit.
He broke the sixth-layer pattern. The seventh yielded after a long, careful demolition of its seven interlocking junctions.
*Template efficiency: 52.8%.*
He opened his eyes.
The hub was quiet. The amber pillar ran its cycle. Gao Jun sat at the workbench with the overlay's display casting pale light across his face and the rod held motionless in his right hand.
Motionless.
"How long?" Lin Feng asked.
"Four hours." Gao Jun's voice was flat. Controlled. He'd been sitting on this. "The northwest beast settled into a circular patrol approximately two kilometers from the hub's surface position. Consistent circling behavior. It hasn't reacquired your signal."
"But."
"The east-southeast beast arrived forty minutes ago." He turned the overlay display so Lin Feng could see it. Two formation-frequency signatures on the tracking model. Both within the hub's local range. Both moving. "It entered the northwest beast's patrol radius and the northwest beast did not engage it. They are not competing for territory. They are not displaying aggressive behavior toward each other."
Lin Feng looked at the display. Two signatures, circling. The same direction. The same approximate distance from the hub. Parallel tracks.
"They're hunting together," Gao Jun said. "The overlay's behavioral analysis doesn't have a model for this. The division's survey data on corrupted beast behavior documents territorial aggression as the primary inter-beast interaction. Two beasts of similar classification in the same territory should be fighting." He set the rod down on the workbench. "They're not fighting. They're circling the hub together, and the third beast is six hours out."
