The pool recovered in stages.
Day one of the eastward travel: fifty-five percent rising to sixty-five as Adaptive Recovery worked steadily without the lateral stage construction competing for pool capacity. Day two: seventy-eight. Day three: functional—not full, full took longer, but functional, which meant Dragon Mode at depth without rationing and the sovereign seed running the five-node integration without the friction of reduced capacity.
He noticed the difference the moment it crossed the functional threshold. Eight days of sustained high-output work had recalibrated his sense of what the sovereign seed felt like under load. Full capacity felt different after that—lighter, the way taking off a heavy coat after wearing it long enough to forget it was there felt lighter.
Eight days at that output level and he'd forgotten what operating at full capacity felt like. He hadn't liked forgetting that.
He filed the observation and walked east.
Soren was designing equipment.
