There was no up or down in the Ascension algorithm. There was only sequence, dependency, and load.
For Zephyr, the first days of the Trance were an exercise in structural maintenance. The five hundred million Faith Points pouring into his collapsed awareness from the Spire's resonance cavity had to be processed, sorted, and applied to the theoretical framework of Rank 10. He existed as a single point of concentration, isolated from the physical plane, suspended in a cognitive space that was entirely composed of mathematical logic and divine energy.
It was a closed system. It had been designed to be impermeable.
Then he found the anomaly.
He did not see it, because sight was a physical sense he had surrendered. He encountered it the way an architect encounters a changed load-bearing formula in a set of blueprints — a deviation in the math that had not been present during the initial calculations.
