He went to zone nineteen without filing a combat contract.
The permit desk had a category for this now—non-combat zone access, Sovereign-Class standing order, no time restriction. The administrator processed it in forty seconds. She had processed enough of his permits to have stopped looking twice at the classification line.
He entered the zone at the seventh hour and went to the interior.
King Body required what War Body had required—and then more. The body rank advance was not a system event that happened when an EP threshold was crossed. That was the ignition. The advance itself required active direction: the sovereign seed and the Dragon-line pool both engaged as the energy source, the King-grade path material accumulated across weeks of A and S-zone work providing the raw substrate for what the body's architecture was about to become.
