The full Keeper network became clearer after that.
It connected their old continental formations through routes hidden beneath the seas, but those routes were only the surface function.
The deeper structures wrapped themselves around the Primordial Slime's protections without ever piercing their cores.
They siphoned information from the seals.
They altered the energy flowing toward them.
Some sections even carried false recognition patterns designed to make damaged restraints interpret an imprisoned authority as something increasingly compatible with the surrounding world.
The Keepers had been trying to loosen the prisons without waking their defenses.
They had failed to complete the process.
The Thousand Races had stopped them before the Primordial Incarnations could return through those routes.
Yet the machinery remained.
Worse, parts of it had spent so long fused with natural flow that the world had begun treating them like ordinary structures.
