The first descent on the second entity cost eighty-one percent.
He surfaced with nineteen remaining and sat at the gorge rim and did the arithmetic without Soren needing to ask. One segment. Five anchor points held simultaneously across a vertical depth range four times what the three-point horizontal grammar had required. The source had shown him the band positions clearly enough the night before—the descent itself wasn't a failure. The segment was in place. But the carrier function holding five distinct depth positions against the layered substrate's pressure differential between bands was a different order of draw from anything the first chain had required.
Eighty-one percent for segment one. The three-point horizontal opened at seventy-one. Ten points higher for two additional anchor nodes and a vertical geometry. Soren will want the exact figure. File it: five-point vertical, first segment, eighty-one percent. New high-water mark.
