Xu Wuyi noticed the change on the morning of the seventy-second day.
At the time, he was performing his daily inner observation in the Cultivation Room, his consciousness sunk deep into the Sea of Consciousness, where the Fruit's patterns were clearly visible to his senses. Morning light shone in through the window, casting a long diagonal strip across the floor as dust drifted slowly within it. He focused on the arrangement of the patterns on the Fruit's surface and confirmed that their density had increased by another layer since yesterday.
Yet during his observation, he noticed a detail he had not closely examined before—the warm golden radiance inside the Fruit, while continuously flowing, did not entirely return to the trunk after passing across the Fruit's surface. Part of it instead flowed outward against the direction of the root network. That counterflow was slow and minute. If he had not been keeping high-frequency records of his inner observations, he might easily have missed it.
He stopped and extended his consciousness along the path of that counterflow. He traced the thread of warm golden light from the Fruit's surface into the root network, moving outward against the direction of the connecting lines, through the main channels and branch nodes, until it finally reached several Rootline nodes operating normally. Upon reaching those nodes, the light did not linger. It directly seeped into the cores of several nearby Rootlines and merged with their core radiance.
He repeated the observation three times in his inner sight. Every result was the same—after completing its circulation, part of the Fruit's energy did not return to the trunk. Instead, it spread outward through the root network's reverse paths and was ultimately absorbed by Rootline cores scattered throughout the network. He had not noticed this before because the counterflow