The three transit corridors took two days.
Not because the engagement difficulty was high — the team's calibration had reached the point where Tier 5 threats in the primordial environment were demanding rather than dangerous. The two days were the distances. Eight hundred kilometres of active corridor required spatial fold efficiency that moved the team between sites faster than conventional travel but still required the fold coordinates to be properly established rather than approximated.
The caravan work was what the contracts had specified: the merchant convoys on all three routes were stranded, their defensive configurations maintaining under the continuous beast pressure but without the capacity to clear the threat populations and resume movement. He took the vanguard work on the routes while the team handled the defensive perimeter — the pattern they had been running since the academy, adjusted for the primordial physics, functioning.
What he was actually doing on the routes was the specimen survey.
The beast anatomy was wrong. He had read the first indication on the Shadow-Stalker Alpha — the mana vein structure warped into channels running a specific frequency that had no place in natural territorial predation. The frequency was the same class as what he had read in Saylor's channels during the extraction, which confirmed the corruption connection, but the mechanism was different.
In Saylor, the corruption had targeted the emotional architecture — grief, isolation, the psychological vulnerabilities the grief had opened. What it was doing in the fauna was a different application: not targeting existing vulnerabilities but broadcasting a manufactured emotional state. The specific frequency the warped mana veins were running was not the corruption itself. It was a signal.
"A broadcast requires an antenna," he said, when he had finished the dissection.
Rosanne was beside him, cleaning the black fluid from her buckler with the efficiency of someone who had been doing post-engagement cleanup since first year. "Which means there's a source node somewhere."
"Yes," he said. "And the antenna's signal is propagating through the local ecosystem, not through practitioner channels. The water table, probably — the fastest way to reach every fauna population in a wide radius simultaneously."
"Can you track it?"
"I can track the spatial friction of where the signal was strongest," he said. "The pattern the signal leaves in the ambient mana field has a directionality. If I read it at enough points along the corridor, I can map the source."
He read it at eleven points across the two days' work.
The direction was consistent: northwest, into the volcanic canyon system the maps at the frontier settlement had marked as uncharted.
The pristine specimens were a secondary finding that became a primary one.
In the zones where the corruption's spread had been thickest and longest-established, the local flora had produced something in response. Not adaptation to the corruption — resistance to it. Concentrated pockets of mana at a density and purity that the Fate's Eye read as different in character from the standard primordial ambient: pre-differentiation, the elemental affinities not yet separated into their specific expressions.
He had read about this theoretically in the Heavenly Scriptures' deepest sections. Before the current framework's installation, before the elemental affinities had differentiated into Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Space — there had been a substrate from which they differentiated. The framework's installation had organised that substrate. In places where the framework hadn't reached, or where the natural environment had been under the specific pressure that the corruption provided, the substrate apparently re-emerged.
He preserved twelve specimens. Isolde would have extensive opinions about them.
"The closer we get to the heavy infection vectors, the more concentrated these become," Rosanne said, looking at the sealed storage case. "It's like the world is generating antibodies."
"It's an evolutionary pressure response," he said. "The corruption is forcing the deep substrate to the surface. Which means the source node's immediate environment will have the highest concentration of these specimens and the highest corruption density simultaneously."
"The source is also the cure factory," she said.
"Potentially," he said. "If the pre-differentiation substrate can be processed the way Isolde processed the Sovereign Catalyst."
He didn't commit to the hypothesis yet. He filed it alongside the antenna hypothesis and the water table contamination theory and continued toward the northwest.
The canyon descent took three hours.
The temperature dropped in a way that contradicted the volcanic geology — not the cold of altitude or depth, the cold of something that was actively removing heat from the surrounding environment. The absence of the triple suns' light was not the absence of warmth but the absence of the specific frequency the corruption couldn't tolerate.
The cavern at the canyon's base was large enough that its ceiling was not visible.
At its centre: the source.
The organism had been botanical once. The spatial sense read the biological architecture — cell structure, vascular system, the root organisation that had been designed for nutrient absorption and stability. But every system had been modified toward the same function.
The bark had split open along thousands of vertical fissures, each one venting the black fluid that the corrupted mana veins in the fauna had been carrying. The root system didn't spread horizontally for stability. It went straight down, the Fate's Eye reading the depth at approximately 1.4 kilometres — through the bedrock and into the aquifer that fed the entire sector's groundwater.
He mapped the mechanism in sequence.
Water drawn up from the aquifer through the root system. Saturated with the wrath-frequency corruption as it moved through the organism's modified vascular system. Pumped back down into the groundwater table through the deeper root network, contaminated. The contaminated water moving outward through the aquifer to every surface water source in the corridor zones. Every animal that drank from those sources receiving a low-level continuous exposure to the wrath frequency. The exposure not killing, not even obviously changing behaviour — until the threshold accumulated and the self-preservation instinct was simply no longer the strongest signal.
"It's not hunting," Rosanne said, from where she was reading the root structure. "It's manufacturing."
"Yes," he said. "Every beast that drinks from contaminated water becomes part of the blockade. The corruption doesn't need to directly control them — it just needs the wrath frequency to override the instinct that would otherwise prevent them from charging caravan defences."
"The scale of this," Mika said. "How long has this been running?"
He read the organism's growth rings — biological timekeeper, the same principle as trees at home. The organism had been here for approximately twenty-five years. The corruption distribution in Aethelgard's infrastructure had been building for approximately the same period.
"Twenty-five years," he said.
The team was quiet with this.
"The same period as Vorash's gate harvesting operation," Rosanne said.
"Yes," he said.
He looked at the organism. The source node. The antenna.
"The question is whether Vorash planted this or whether it arrived through his operation," he said. "Either he knew this was here and chose not to address it, or he introduced it deliberately as part of the harvesting strategy, or it came through the gate network as an unintended consequence and is operating independently."
"Does the distinction matter for what we do next," Jessica said.
"Yes," he said. "If it arrived through the gate network independently, cutting off Vorash's gates removes the supply. If he introduced it deliberately, cutting off the gates doesn't necessarily address what's already established here. And if he's actively maintaining it—"
"Then the citadel is connected to this," Rosanne said.
"That's the hypothesis I'm going to need the citadel's intelligence to confirm or rule out," he said.
He looked at the root structure going down into the aquifer, the vascular system modified for contamination, the source node that had been running for twenty-five years.
He had the Catalyst devices. The spatial law's coordinate authority could address the root system's integration with the aquifer at the same level it addressed gate anchors. But the contamination already in the aquifer would need to clear naturally once the source was removed, which took time, and the organisms already saturated with the wrath frequency would need to metabolise the corruption out of their systems, which also took time.
This was not a quick resolution.
"We document this completely," he said. "The full spatial map, the biological analysis, the depth measurements, the distribution model. All of it goes to Valerian's office and to Isolde." He looked at the team. "Then we address it. But we address it with the complete picture, because closing this node without understanding the citadel's connection to it might not be addressing the actual source."
"And if the citadel is the actual source," Rosanne said.
"Then we address the citadel," he said.
She looked at him with the expression she used when the conversation had arrived at the point that had been coming since the beginning.
"We're going to the citadel," she said.
"Eventually," he said.
"How eventually."
He looked at the source node. At the root system extending 1.4 kilometres into the aquifer. At twenty-five years of contamination spread through the continent's groundwater.
"Soon," he said.