The accelerated range covered all integrated nodes of the All-Domain Network. Not a single node lagged behind or surged ahead; all accelerated in the same instant and fell back in the same instant.
Like a struck bronze bell sending out a resonant wave after receiving force, the vibration at the point of impact spread across the entire bell surface, producing a synchronized leap in frequency. Only after the signal covered the entire domain did it return to its original speed.
After the acceleration receded, the seventeenth node—
the one at the bottom of the rift on the northwestern frontier—
showed an exceedingly fine silver line within the pulse wave it emitted.
The silver line was less than one percent the width of the main crest. It clung to the inner side of the crest's summit along a path parallel to the main wave, like an overlaid identification mark.
The silver line held a fixed position on the crest.
It appeared in the same place atop every pulse-wave crest, without shifting or drifting.
The silver line then appeared on the sixteenth node—
the fusion point at the northernmost end.
It clung likewise to the inner side of the pulse-wave crest's summit, its width identical to that of the silver line at the seventeenth node.
Then came the fifteenth, the fourteenth, spreading southeastward in sequence.
The order of appearance did not follow the nodes' fusion numbering, but emerged one after another according to geographical direction, from northwest to southeast.
Like the spread of ripples, its origin lay on the northwestern frontier, while the wavefront advanced in arcs, covering the nodes in the southeast one by one. The final one appeared on the first node—
the initial fusion point in the southeast.
Once it appeared atop its crest, the pulse-wave crests of all