Noah reached for the pulse again.
Far out in the Gaps, thousands of Gigaparsecs away, the battle had begun in earnest.
Nine lotuses blazed. Nine cerulean blades spun. A woman with a blue halo poured the Narrative of fifty-five thousand Immense Ones into a single line of light and drove it into a wall of crimson-edged glass. The Stillness answered with frozen moments, trillions of them, rolling out across the dark like a tide made of almost.
Through his forests, he could feel all of it. The pulls on either side. The trees bending. The rivers running fast and slow.
And underneath it, the pulse.
It was right there. Slow, steady, vast, rising and falling under the battle like a sea under two ships. He had felt it once already. He knew it was real.
So he reached for it.
His Shinjitsu pulsed, matching the beat. He narrowed everything down to that one rhythm and held still, very still, and reached.
And it slipped away.
It was...ridiculously slippery.
