[Empty Fleet Central Ship — Hold — Day 55 — 8:15 AM]
The captain led them below.
The ladder to the hold level was longer than the ship's exterior would suggest — the structural modification visible from inside, the walls reinforced with materials that Emily recognized as treated black coral, the same type of stone they had found on the Black Coral island but processed, turned into building material with spiritual containment properties.
Forty years of work.
Someone had spent forty years building and maintaining this.
The hold was four meters high, and at the center — the containment sphere. Four pillars at the corners holding the field. The man inside with the appearance of thirty years that couldn't possibly be thirty years.
The team entered in silence.
---
Max saw it first.
Not because he was farther ahead — because the previous F4 bearer's spiritual signature arrived before the visual image, and Max had a relationship with that signature that no one else on the team had.
