The systematic survey of the northern gate network took three days.
This was the correct pace — not the pace of urgency, the pace of accurate documentation. He was building a complete picture of the gate network's current state against the baseline readings in the Dominion's regional monitoring archive, and the comparison required the Fate's Eye's full read at each gate site rather than a transit observation.
Sector 4's gates had been addressed. He worked outward from there: the minor Class-II and Class-III gates that the Dominion's garrison monitored as routine infrastructure, the Blue Gates and Green Gates that produced the low-tier dungeon populations that the Dominion's frontier practitioners used for basic cultivation work.
From the outside, most of them were stable.
From the Fate's Eye's read at 100% spatial law comprehension, a different picture.
The same signature he had identified in the Red Gate's mutation node pattern — the deliberate disruption architecture, the void-adjacent conversion concentrated at specific structural nodes rather than uniform degradation — was present in eleven of the fourteen gates he surveyed in Sectors 5 through 9. Not at the Red Gate's advanced stage. Early-stage, the conversion having progressed to the point where it was detectable through the Fate's Eye's read but not yet producing the visible anomalies that had flagged the Red Gate for the garrison's attention.
Not random. Not natural drift.
Systematic. Being applied to the gates in a specific sequence.
He documented each site with the same spatial mapping methodology he had used for the temporal anomaly survey — the coordinate data, the conversion node positions, the current conversion percentage at each gate, the trajectory if the rate held constant.
When he had sufficient data, he ran the convergence analysis.
The conversion rates were not uniform across the gate network. They were graduated — the gates in the outer sectors at earlier stages, the gates closer to the northern wilderness at more advanced stages. The gradient had a direction.
He found the convergence point by tracing the gradient to its source.
The unmapped wilderness northeast of Sector 12. The specific location the gradient was pointing at: a geological feature the Dominion's mapping archive described as the Abyssal Trench — a tectonically-active deep fissure in the northern permafrost that had been classified as inhospitable to standard dungeon operations due to the extreme depth and the unstable mana pressure at the lower levels.
He sat on a ridge at Sector 9's highest point with the spatial map spread across his consciousness and confirmed the analysis.
Whatever was applying the conversion architecture to the gate network was operating from the Abyssal Trench. The gates were not the primary objective — they were the mechanism. The conversion of the gates toward void-adjacent properties was producing something: the specific mana flow that the conversion extracted from each gate's standard operation was being redirected.
Redirected toward the Trench.
He thought about what had accumulated in the Trench if this had been running for thirty years — the estimate Nyx's previous communication had suggested for when the acceleration began.
Thirty years of directed mana extraction from eleven gates, funnelled into a single geological location.
Whatever was in the Trench had access to a significant accumulated reserve.
He documented this and sent the full analysis to Valerian's office and to the restricted archive research team.
Then he thought about what to do next.
The answer was obvious, which was not the same as it being wise. Going directly into the Abyssal Trench with the Time law at 0.5% comprehension and third-page access, against whatever had been operating in there for thirty years with access to the accumulated reserves of eleven gates, was the kind of obvious answer that required significant qualification before it became the correct answer.
He had third-page access to the Time law. What the third page described — the specific temporal application that the second page's understanding enabled — was not an offensive capability. It was the practitioner's ability to establish their own temporal anchor: the stable position within the absolute flow from which the river could be read without being swept into it. The same thing the fisherman by the River of Time had been doing. The foundation without which everything that came after was significantly less stable.
He had not yet established that anchor.
He needed to do that before he went into the Trench.
The anchor establishment required the kind of sustained, uninterrupted cultivation session that the past three days of gate survey had not been — a quiet environment, sufficient time, and the full focus of the Time law's 0.5% on the specific work the third page described.
He stood on the Sector 9 ridge and looked toward the northeast, where the Abyssal Trench was below the horizon, doing whatever it had been doing for thirty years without his knowledge.
It had been doing it for thirty years.
It could wait three more days.
He sent the message to the team's watch channel.
Survey complete. Returning to estate. Full briefing tonight. Then I need four days of uninterrupted cultivation time. After that: the Trench.
Rosanne's response arrived in less than two minutes, which was consistent with her having been awake and monitoring since before he expected.
Understood. What do you need for the four days?
Perimeter coverage, he sent. Nobody through the study door for the duration.
Done, she sent.
He folded the space between his current position and the estate and went through.
The northern range continued its geological patience in the interval behind him, and whatever was in the Abyssal Trench continued its thirty-year work, and both of those things were going to be exactly where they were when he finished the third page's work.
He had three days to prepare before he had to decide how to approach something that had been waiting significantly longer than three days.
Three days was enough time to prepare correctly.
Not enough to prepare completely.
The distinction was the one that mattered.