She leaned in. Instinctively. The academic pulling her forward like gravity, her body tilting toward the page, her glasses sliding down her nose. She pushed them up. Leaned closer. Her shoulder touched mine. She didn't notice. Or she did, and she didn't care, because the formula was more important than the contact.
I wrote. She watched.
The pen moved through the theoretical framework — the modified containment matrix, the soul harmonic, the distributed network. Each new variable built on the last. Each notation led to the next. The math was complex, drawing from seven separate disciplines — necromancy, soul mechanics, mana theory, spiritual architecture, dimensional topology, resonance physics, and something I called "cognitive substrate mapping" that didn't exist in any textbook she'd ever read.
