The changes to the Evening Session came faster than Zhou Mingyuan had expected.
That night, he stood before the gray-white wall. When he reached the mid-session break, someone below raised a hand. "Teacher Zhou, may I share something I felt?" Zhou Mingyuan nodded. The person stood up—a veteran from the Western Defense Line whose core was already close to the edge of metamorphosis. His voice was quiet, but clear enough in the silent Assembly Hall. "Last night, I was on night watch at the defense line, standing alone beside the outermost node in the eastern sector. There was nothing around me—no Star Beasts, no abnormal signals—but I felt something. My core was pulsing, not because I was nervous or alert. It was pulsing on its own. Its rhythm matched the pulses of the other nodes in the network. I could sense people far away resting, training, tossing and turning in their sleep. Those sensations appeared directly in my consciousness. I wasn't guessing. They just appeared."
"
After speaking, he sat down. The Assembly Hall remained quiet for several breaths. Then another voice came from the back rows. It belonged to a young Rootline, carrying the strained tightness of someone only recently forged. "I've felt that too. Not on the defense line, but in the cafeteria. When I was eating by the window, I could sense that someone several tables away was in a bad mood. I didn't infer it from his expression. My core told me directly."
"
Zhou Mingyuan stood before the wall without interrupting them. Only after the residual echoes of those two accounts had fully faded from the Assembly Hall did he speak. His voice was low, but every word was distinct. "What you just described was not speculation or imagination. The network was feeding its sensory