Chapter 169: Quiet Calculations and An Unscheduled Patrol.
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"Anything unusual, you tug on my sleeve," Lumo said. Raka swallowed, nodded. They sat side-by-side at the rim, companions forged in Nima's peculiar heart black-hole, now guardians on a cliff.
Kent could not sleep. He and Jade knelt over parchment, sketching possible rune matrices. Jade's earlier theatrics had apparently cost him that shard, but he now radiated professor-like calm. He murmured comparisons of line curvature, hypothesized that the shard formed part of a "keystone coil" channeling raw spatial turbulence into harmonic flux.
Kent mostly listened, ears tuned equally to the scholarly murmur and to the distant warden camp. Twice patrol torches swept the slope below, but nothing climbed higher. Somewhere below, a herd wolf howled, another answered farther west, then silence.
