Seven days.
He enforced it explicitly rather than implicitly — told the team in specific terms that the next deployment was not happening for seven days, that he expected each of them to use the interval for the kind of rest that was not the same as the kind of sleep that happened between mission briefings, and that he was doing the same.
The team dispersed.
He went to Cedar Grove.
The estate in late autumn was the estate he had known since before the academy: the beech trees with their remaining leaves, the specific way the morning fog came off the coast property's beach section before the sun cleared it, the particular sound the greenhouse made when the wind came from the north.
He fixed the greenhouse's structural faults on the second morning. Not because it was urgent — the faults were minor and the greenhouse had been functioning with them for an unknown period — but because he noticed them and he was in a state of mind where fixing things that could be fixed was satisfying in a way that the larger problems currently couldn't be. He reinforced the perimeter wards while he was at it, the spatial law's 100% comprehension making the ward updates considerably more thorough than what had been there.
Sloane did not comment on the greenhouse. He did say, after the wards were done, that the estate's defensive architecture was now meaningfully better than it had been before, which was Sloane's version of thanks.
He sat with them in the mornings over the kind of extended breakfast that Cedar Grove produced when Isolde was doing the cooking: unhurried, several courses, the conversation running at the pace of people who were not managing an agenda.
He did not talk about Vorash or the gates or the temporal anchor network. He talked about the food and about the northern climate's effect on cultivation pace and about whether the second floor guest room needed the window frame replaced before winter.
The window frame probably needed replacement.
He would look at it in the afternoon.
Isolde had the Violet-Veined Ashen Stalk specimens in her laboratory by the second day.
"The silica vein structure," she said, when he came in to watch. She had the specimen under the vacuum containment array that the estate laboratory maintained for exactly this category of high-density material. "It's not absorption in the standard alchemical sense. It's restructuring. The ambient particles in the immediate environment are being converted toward the plant's native atmospheric density."
"The pre-framework atmospheric density," he said.
"Yes. Which means this plant would be lethal in our environment over extended exposure — not immediately, but it would gradually convert the local atmospheric mana toward conditions our practitioner physiology isn't calibrated for." She made a note. "But the conversion rate is slow, and the silica veins are what's driving it. Isolated silica extract from the vein structure, at the right concentration, might produce the opposite effect — a compound that helps practitioner physiology adapt to the pre-framework atmosphere rather than converting the atmosphere toward standard conditions."
He thought about this.
"You're proposing using the plant's own conversion mechanism against the adaptation problem," he said.
"I'm proposing testing whether that's possible," she said. "I'm not proposing anything until I have three weeks of trial data."
She looked at him with the expression she used when she was making a practical observation that also contained a parental one.
"You're not going back through that arch for three weeks at minimum," she said. "And probably longer, if the compound takes longer to develop. Which means you should stop looking at the specimens as though they're blocking the path and start looking at them as something useful to understand."
"I'm not impatient," he said.
She gave him the look that was her version of a complete sentence about the accuracy of that statement.
"I'm less impatient than I was at seven," he said.
"That is true," she said. "It's a meaningful improvement."
He sat in the laboratory with her for the rest of the afternoon and helped with the preliminary analysis, which was also useful for the work he needed to do and which was genuinely interesting in the way that Isolde's work was always genuinely interesting.
By the end of the week, they had a working prototype of what she was calling a pressure-adaptation compound — not the finished product, the first formulation that lab trials had confirmed produced measurable adaptation to higher-density atmospheric conditions in the test cultures. The human trials would take longer.
"Good enough for initial field use with monitoring," she said. "Not good enough to rely on entirely. The adaptation it produces is real but partial."
"Partial is better than none," he said.
"Yes," she said. "But don't treat it as complete."
"I won't."
"I know you know that," she said. "I'm saying it so I've said it."
He packed the prototype compounds into the inventory with the appropriate stasis conditions for each, and on the seventh day he went back to the capital.
The Sextants were Elena's team's contribution to the week.
Not seven days' work — the research had been running in parallel since the recording prisms came back from the Shattered Expanse, and the calibration work had been three weeks of intermittent sessions. The field test confirmation had given them the final piece of the frequency profile they needed to isolate Vorash's gate signature from standard void-adjacent gate openings.
The result: detection arrays that could identify Vorash's harvester gate signature before the conversion process had advanced to the visible stage. Days of advance warning instead of hours.
"The calibration is specific to his signature," Elena said, in the briefing that evening. "If he modifies the conversion architecture significantly, we'll need to recalibrate. But the current architecture has been consistent across every gate we've analysed, which suggests it's a design constraint rather than a stylistic choice."
"He can't easily change the conversion architecture because it's what the harvester gates are designed to do," Markus said. "Modifying it would mean re-engineering the gates themselves."
"That's the assumption the detection arrays are built on," Elena confirmed. "We're treating it as probably correct and building plans that address the risk if it isn't."
Terros, from the far end of the table: "The Sextants are deployable to the frontier garrison network within the month. If we want advance warning coverage across the full gate network rather than just the northern Dominion region."
"Deploy them," Markus said. "Full network. I want the Imperial Guard and the Dominion's garrison commanders briefed on what the Sextant readings mean and what the reporting protocol is when they identify a developing signature."
The team reassembled on the eighth morning with the specific quality of practitioners who had actually rested — not performed rest, had it. He read their mana signatures through the spatial sense before they were in the same room and confirmed what the signatures indicated.
"Good week," Rosanne said.
"Yes," he said.
"You fixed the greenhouse."
"The structural faults were minor but present."
"Sloane sent me a message about it," she said. "He described it as 'typical' in the tone he uses for things he's proud of."
He had Rosalind's training updates from the week in the communication device. The Stage 4 Ghost Sense results, the void affinity's continued development, the notebook she maintained at the same density she had maintained since the first month of the tutoring assignment.
He would review them this evening.
"The operational framework for the next phase," he said. "We're distinguishing between the harvester gates — which we close with the Catalyst — and the gateways that lead to the primordial space itself, which we access for research. The Sextants give us advance warning on harvester gate formation. The Catalyst closes them before they mature. What we don't yet have is an understanding of the citadel."
"The archive findings," Rosanne said.
"The archive findings," he confirmed. "Today. The research team has been working on the construction language cross-reference since I returned. I need to review what they found before we design the next approach."
He looked at the team.
"We're not going back through a primordial gate until we understand what we're going toward," he said. "The field test confirmed the Catalyst works. The Sextants confirm the detection methodology works. The compound Isolde is developing addresses the atmospheric adaptation problem. Those are the tools. What we don't yet have is the intelligence on the citadel's construction status and what the arch's door function is actually for."
"And the intelligence leak," Rosanne said.
"The intelligence leak is running through imperial channels independently. I don't touch that investigation directly — it's better if I'm not in it while it's running."
She received this.
"Archive first," she said.
"Archive first," he agreed.
He went.