The atmosphere of Evening Session had changed quietly over the past two months.
Zhou Mingyuan stood before the gray-white wall. After finishing the day's final sharing segment, he set down the Data Pad and waited for questions from below. He waited about ten breaths, but no one raised a hand. Yet he noticed something: the core pulse frequencies of the more than three hundred people below had completed a faint synchronization at the exact moment he finished his last sentence. That synchronization lasted longer than any before. What had once been a fleeting instant of pulsing had become a brief, sustained resonance, like a plucked string that did not immediately fall silent, but continued vibrating for several breaths before gradually calming.
He stood at the front without speaking, quietly sensing the aftereffects of that resonance slowly dissipate through the air. Someone below looked up at him, their eyes carrying an expression he had begun to see often lately—not confusion, not anticipation, but the calm that came only after confirmation.
After Evening Session ended, Zhou Mingyuan packed up his equipment and was walking back along the main street when a young face called out to him. The young man looked under twenty. He was a newly forged Rootline who had completed forging two months earlier and had been assigned to assist the Engineering Formation. He stood beneath a streetlamp, the warm golden glow of his core faintly visible through his uniform, slightly brighter than normal.
"Teacher Zhou." The young man hesitated. "I have a question. When I sit in the dorm with people from the same formation—not training, just resting—I can feel a very thin line connecting their cores to mine. It isn't something I imagined. I can really feel it. I never had this feeling before. It started about half