The second segment cost seventy-three percent.
He surfaced at twenty-seven percent remaining and sat in the eastern scrubland's morning and did the arithmetic. The adapted grammar wasn't stabilising between segments the way standard chain grammar had. Each time he descended, he had to re-establish the connection between the chain infrastructure and the entity's asymmetric nodes from near-scratch—the carrier function holding a custom geometry rather than slotting into a known template that the substrate remembered.
Two segments in. Two days of build at seventy-plus percent per session. At this rate, a chain that should take twelve segments takes twelve days of single-segment work. Slower than the western chains by a factor of three. That's the cost of adapted grammar without a template. File it.
He told Soren.
