Whatever else could be said, the mature, tightly structured Main-Attached Network had a considerable capacity to repair itself.
Farul answered none of the incoming messages, but the interface told him enough. The many errors were rapidly resolving, and the network was reloading rather than collapsing outright. Its error rate was clearly falling.
Looking down through the Abyssal Spirit Net, he sensed much the same thing directly from the Subsidiary Network's structure, though it continued to fluctuate within a certain range.
The "Giant Beast" had not suffered a second blow of equal force. It was still "struggling and convulsing," but its reactions also concealed some of the finer details.
Of course, a perceptive Formal Priest like Farul could already make out the shape of You Chong Star's Subsidiary Network.
People at their level all knew that the Subsidiary Network came from the Skipped Stitches drawn out of the Divine Cloaks. They spilled down from the Abyss Zone and wove together in the Transition Layer, leaving the world a path to climb.
But when the network shook violently, the differences between the strands from various Divine Cloaks became plain.
For years, the Red Silicon Star System had been administered by priests assigned from the Lord of Dawn's system. Most of its Faithful belonged to that system as well, so a certain bias was inevitable.
In the Subsidiary Network, this meant some channels of exchange and feedback were more convenient than others. They grew stronger year after year, making the imbalance in the overall structure increasingly obvious... No, its "dynamic balance."
Ordinarily, that did not matter. In a crisis, maintaining that "dynamic balance" became an added burden.
Even though the clergy here all served under the Lord of Dawn, they could not simply protect their own channels. They had to sustain the ones