He noticed it on a Wednesday morning.
Not through the World Threat Response or the Sovereign bond monitoring or the System's classification architecture.
Through walking.
He was walking the Ashrow's edge — the specific circuit he had walked the night before the departure for the wellspring, the familiar route through the district that had become the habit of Wednesday mornings.
He walked the boundary where the Domain's clean architecture met the broader city's slightly less clean architecture.
The boundary was further than it had been.
Not by a dramatic margin.
Two hundred meters.
He walked to where the boundary should have been and kept walking and the Domain's quality kept running around him and kept running and kept running until he reached the point where it transitioned.
Two hundred meters further than six months ago.
Not from his active maintenance.
Not from a deliberate expansion of the Stabilization function.
The Domain had expanded on its own.
