The corruption increased as they drew closer, installed gradually across the territory with the ambient pressure of something that was no longer any single source but the combined background of many small ones that had found the same channel.
It had been building without announcement.
Like the difference between hearing a sound and hearing the silence that remained after the sound stopped, but in reverse: a sound you began registering as you approached, which by the time you recognized it you had been hearing long enough not to know exactly when it started.
Ren had caught it at the Gold 3 border because he had the range to read the more marked difference.
But by now, in the open territory approaching the ruins, there was no ambiguity about it.
The group had sharpened. The attention each person was paying to the territory had changed, that particular shift that happened when people who knew what they were doing understood that it was time.
