The chamber was Sakura Miyamoto's private sanctuary, a place carved from the deep, silent stone beneath the Sanctuary in Giza. There were no computers, no holographic displays. The only light came from a single, simple paper lantern, and the only sound was the soft whisper of her own breathing. The three ancient scrolls lay open before her, their shadowy, star-dusted surfaces seeming to drink the dim light.
She was not reading them. She was listening to them.
With her full power unlocked, the world was no longer a collection of solid objects. It was a symphony of vibrations, a tapestry woven from the threads of space-time itself. She could feel the subtle, constant hum of the planet's rotation, the gentle pressure of the moon's gravity, the deep, resonant pulse of the stellar nucleus deposits buried in the Earth's crust.
These deposits, the mines that the nations of the world were so desperate to claim, were not just random clusters of power. They were nodes. They were the great anchor points in the tapestry, and connecting them were faint, invisible lines of stable, traversable space. The Veins of the World.
Her great work, the project that had consumed her since the Battle of Tokyo, was to map this impossible, invisible geography. She sat in a state of deep meditation, her mind drifting from her body, her consciousness expanding to encompass the globe. She was not a person; she was a point of awareness, tracing the glowing, energetic pathways that crisscrossed the planet like a nervous system.
She mapped the great vein that ran from the Amazon to the Congo. She traced the jagged, fractured line that connected the ravaged mine in the Rub' al Khali to the deep deposits in Siberia. She was building a new kind of atlas, a map not of land and sea, but of the secret highways of reality itself.
Her ultimate goal was ambitious to the point of insanity: to use her own power to create permanent "gateways" at these key nodes, stable folds in space that would allow the Coalition to move its forces across the globe in a single step. She was not just a Director of Logistics; she was a one-woman subway system for the planet.
As she traced the energetic threads that snaked across Europe, her consciousness, a whisper on the currents of reality, encountered a snag.
It was centered deep beneath the city of Berlin. It was not a natural formation. The clean, harmonious lines of the spatial veins, which should have flowed smoothly, were twisted and knotted here. It was a psychic and spatial blockage, a dead zone that felt like a tangled, ugly scar on the perfect tapestry. It was a knot that had been tied deliberately, its structure complex, malicious, and utterly unnatural.
She focused, trying to get a clearer sense of the knot's structure. The moment her consciousness touched it, she felt a violent, hostile pushback. It was a wave of pure, cold rage, a psychic "keep out" sign that was so powerful it felt like a physical blow.
Sakura gasped, her eyes flying open, her consciousness snapping back into her body in the silent, lantern-lit chamber in Giza. She was breathing heavily, a cold sweat on her brow. She had touched something ancient, something intelligent, and something that did not want to be found.
She knew, with absolute certainty, that this was not a random anomaly caused by the Starfall. This was a cage, a prison, a deliberately constructed knot in the fabric of the world, designed to contain something. Or perhaps, to hide something.
She rose, her movements calm despite her racing heart. This was not a logistical problem anymore. This was an intelligence matter. She walked out of her sanctuary and headed directly for the office of the one person in the Coalition who could understand a warning that came not from a satellite, but from the whispers of reality itself: Director Amira Khan.