The final four segments took most of a day.
Not because the build was slow—it was the fastest he had built since the ancient network assist began. The original network was doing the structural work on each new segment almost before he had finished laying the anchor. Forty-five minutes per segment. The pool at fifty-five percent at each session start, which was the lowest he had sustained, but stable—Adaptive Recovery holding the floor.
The slowness was in him. Not inability. Something more like weight. Not the tiredness from day seven but the specific quality of a body that had been doing high-output work for eight days straight and was ready, without complaint, to be done.
One more. Then one more. That's all it is.
He built the forty-third segment. He surfaced. He went back down.
The forty-fourth. Surface. Recovery.
The forty-fifth.
He held the final segment at anchor and waited for the ancient network to integrate it.
