He descended at first light.
Five chains built. He knew the approach: establish the anchor, set the first conducting element, let the entity's existing management architecture meet the new infrastructure halfway. The technique was established. He had refined it across three arcs of the road network's construction.
He held the carrier function at full depth and reached for the anchor point.—
The grammar didn't seat.
Not violently. No fracture in the substrate, no destabilizing pressure release. The anchor tried to distribute across the standard five-point pattern and the entity's architecture simply didn't accept it. The load distribution below was asymmetric. The five-point pattern expected a radial structure. What was here was something else—shaped by decades of workaround pressure running in a single direction rather than slow even accumulation. The anchor tried to hold and slipped sideways. He released before it could fail.
He surfaced.
