Chen Dai received the third set of compiled data on the morning of the tenth day. Five sheets lay spread across the desk in the duty room, the creases along their edges deeper than on the previous two occasions, as though being repeatedly taken out and put away had gradually formed permanent folds. He stood before the desk, read from the first sheet to the last, then went through them again. All five sets showed the same upward trend in the frequency and intensity of the undercurrents. The rate of increase had slowed slightly compared with the data from the previous two weeks, but the persistent upward trajectory remained unchanged. During his second reading, he noticed a detail that had never been recorded before-the undercurrent waveforms in the records from Central West Node Four and Northern East Node Three showed a slight shift, as though slowly transitioning from one state to another.
He picked up a pen and sketched the waveform shifts at those two nodes on a fresh sheet. They shifted in the same direction and by similar amounts, as though the same force had applied identical corrections at multiple locations simultaneously. Beneath the diagram, he wrote a line: "Waveform shifts follow the same direction. Suspect the physical properties of the undercurrents themselves are changing." Then he folded the fresh sheet, placed it in the drawer with the previous three sets of records, locked it, and rose to leave the duty room.
He met Shen Tinglan in the corridor. She was coming from the Scout Formation's quarters with a Data Pad in hand, walking faster than usual. They both stopped at the corridor junction.
"The hybrid overlay has expanded to the edges of the Scout Formation's patrol routes," Shen Tinglan said, her voice carrying the certainty that came only