Jiang headed to the Coordinate Anchor Marker again on the morning of the eighteenth day. He continuously monitored the marker's signal as he traveled, but as he approached the anchor, his perception caught a clear anomaly. The translucent surface in that region of space had undergone a drastic change over the past several hours. Its boundary had shifted from slowly drawing inward to rapidly contracting, and its internal density had jumped to an entirely new order of magnitude in an extremely short time.
He picked up his pace, crouched when he reached the marker, and extended his perception toward the surface. It was still drawing inward, and the membrane's transparency was rapidly decreasing as it shifted from a translucent state toward an almost solid density. He stayed there for a while, completed several sets of scan records, then stood and returned to the territory along the same route, moving faster than usual.
His breathing had not quite settled when he returned to the Core Residence hall. As he handed the Data Pad to Xu Wuyi at the console, Jiang's voice carried the urgency that came only after confirming a critical development. "The translucent surface is contracting rapidly, and its density has jumped by an order of magnitude in a short time. If it maintains its current pace, it will finish converging within a few days."
Xu Wuyi sat at the console and read through all the data, then set the Data Pad on the console, stood, and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. Outside, morning light was slowly rising from the edge of the void, illuminating the warm golden points of light scattered throughout the territory one by one. He sensed the rapidly converging translucent surface at the coordinate anchor beyond the Northern Boundary Line, the persistent faint warmth in Ji