The second alignment lasted longer.
Seventy-two minutes.
No headline triggered it.
No shock justified it.
It emerged from timing alone.
In New York City, short-dated options gamma flipped positive to negative and back within one oscillatory band.
In London, volatility arbitrage desks noted identical crest timing across equity and FX variance curves.
In Tokyo, liquidity depth thinned not from fear—but from synchronized hedging.
The waves had aligned again.
Maya projected the composite waveform.
This time the interference pattern did not alternate cleanly.
It stacked.
Constructive overlap reinforced through multiple cycles.
Energy was no longer dissipating between beats.
It was carrying forward.
She highlighted the condition mathematically:
Equal frequency.
Near-zero phase difference.
That is phase lock.
Keith felt the shift before he saw it on the board.
Markets were not surging.
They were tightening.
Price ranges compressed while hedging flows intensified beneath the surface.
When oscillatory systems lock, visible amplitude can shrink—
while internal energy rises.
Jasmine overlaid a stability analog from nonlinear dynamics.
The behavior resembled a logistic escalation.
When r is small, the system stabilizes.
When r increases, oscillation begins.
Past a threshold, cycles double.
Beyond that—chaos.
They were not at chaos.
But r was increasing.
Incentives were strengthening alignment.
In Chicago, automated hedging programs recalibrated cycle detection windows in real time.
In Singapore, macro funds shortened volatility harvest horizons by 18%.
In Frankfurt, liquidity providers widened micro spreads by fractions invisible to retail participants—but meaningful to systemic damping.
Everyone sensed the lock.
No one called it that.
Seventy-two minutes in, a minor corporate guidance revision hit screens.
Ordinarily immaterial.
But within phase lock, even small perturbations couple efficiently into the system.
The reaction was not explosive.
It was coherent.
All major asset classes moved directionally for precisely one extended cycle.
Then—
A break.
Not dramatic.
Just one desk in Zurich stepping off-cycle by milliseconds due to an internal latency recalibration.
Phase shifted.
Constructive overlap degraded into partial interference.
The waveform fractured.
Energy dispersed.
The lock dissolved.
Again, the system survived.
But the duration had increased.
Forty-seven minutes.
Seventy-two minutes.
Trend: upward.
Maya created a new boundary layer:
Phase Persistence Duration (PPD).
Short PPD: oscillatory environment.
Moderate PPD: structural stress.
Extended PPD: regime shift risk.
Current peak: 72 minutes.
Model projection under incentive continuation: 110 minutes within weeks.
Keith asked quietly, "What happens at two hours?"
Jasmine answered without looking up.
"At sufficient duration, participants adapt to the lock itself."
"And then?"
"Lock becomes baseline."
In resonant systems, temporary alignment is survivable.
Permanent alignment redefines equilibrium.
Volatility ceases to oscillate.
It channels.
Liquidity ceases to absorb.
It synchronizes.
Chapter 178 closes with a realization more subtle than crisis:
The system is no longer testing whether phase lock is possible.
It has proven that it is.
The question now is duration.
Because in dynamic systems, time under alignment is more dangerous than amplitude.
The architecture still stands.
But each lock lengthens.
And the longer the lock—
the harder it becomes to break.