Valdenmoor had been changing while he was gone.
Not dramatically — not the overnight quality of a global notification landing in sleeping minds. The slower change of a city that had received a large shock and was processing it the way large shocks get processed. Incrementally. Unevenly. Some parts faster and some parts slower and some parts resistant and some parts so ready that three weeks felt like three years.
He felt it through the Domain before he saw it.
The System architecture running cleaner than it had been when he left — not because the World Stabilization function had changed, it had been running the same since the evolution. Because the city had changed around it. The people moving through the framework were different — not in Class or Level, those changed slowly. In how they used the framework. The specific quality of people who had stopped accepting the System's approximations without question and were beginning to develop their own relationship with it.
