Chapter 444 - 443: What It Sends Next
Location:Seven Peaks — Shadow Pavilion Office, Main Gate, Command Center
Date/Time:TC1855.04.20
The healer arrived on the eighteenth.
She came from the northeast — a woman in her middle years with a medical satchel over one shoulder and the exhausted, wary posture of someone who’d been walking for a long time through territory that didn’t feel safe anymore. She told the gate processing clerk that she’d been working in a village thirty kilometers from the Sanctum perimeter until the animals started dying, the patients stopped getting better, and the feeling in the air changed to something she couldn’t name but couldn’t ignore.
She wanted shelter. She wanted to practice. She wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t slowly going wrong.
The scanner embedded in the main gate corridor — twenty-three formation crystal nodes in the walls and floor, running continuously, passively — read her spiritual signature as she walked through.
Green.
The processing clerk noted her name, her origin, and her stated purpose. Assigned her temporary housing in the civilian quarter. Directed her to the Medicine Hall for professional registration.
Standard procedure. Another refugee from the east. Seven Peaks had been processing them for months.
***
The merchant arrived on the nineteenth.
He came from the east-southeast — a man in his forties with two pack animals and a sample case of formation-enhanced tools. Household goods, mostly. Heating plates, preservation containers, and self-sharpening blades. The kind of merchandise that sold well in communities where spiritual energy was thick enough to power formation-enhanced items, but supply chains from the Imperial capital hadn’t reached.