The Demonic Statue of the Outer Path's final nine isolation interfaces must be resealed before they fail

Before the fifth Monitoring Anchor went dark, the Land of Rain shut down its corresponding Observation Window.

It was not the interface that had been shut down.

The nine empty slots remained separate.

The fifth had received no tailed beast chakra, nor had it regained any awareness of the other eight.

What had failed was the outer eye responsible for sounding the alarm.

If the weakening Monitoring Anchor were left running, it might report a missed warning as an all-clear.

Shutting it down deliberately at least let everyone know that this location was temporarily out of sight.

The eighth Monitoring Anchor still had less than thirty percent of its fluctuations remaining.

The Technical Team did not wait for it to go completely dark.

All nine interfaces were individually placed under the highest level of shutdown.

Any maintenance could touch only the outer anchor bodies.

The interfaces could not be opened to inspect their interiors.

Nor could the nine sets of status data be fed back into a single bus for convenience.

The old anchors had originally been built to track the Black Zetsu Remnant over the short term.

Later, when the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path was dismantled into nine empty slots, the Technical Team repurposed those anchors for long-term monitoring.

The materials' service life had never been tested against the lunar environment or sustained spatial pressure.

Yet the records described them as "stable long-term."

No one had written down how many days "long-term" actually meant.

The fifth anchor's inner crystal chip had already begun to turn white.

Tiny cracks had accumulated along the eighth anchor's edges.

The problem was not tampering.

Once a temporary tool had been taken for granted as permanent, responsibility for its maintenance had never been reassigned.

The repair plan began with three firm rules.