Six months passed the way real growth always did, in a rhythm too steady to notice day by day and too obvious to miss looking back on it.
The bottom layer had become something none of them had planned for so directly, but all of them had built toward without quite naming it. Every soul freed through the Geneline's climbing paths, every Asura who survived the long road up from slavery, found Ananta Regalon waiting at the top of it with an open door instead of another cage. Word spread the way word always spread among people who had nothing left to lose and everything left to hope for.
The army grew. Not in careful, measured increments, but in waves, month over month, until the kingdom that had once crawled up out of the bottom plane with a double handful of names now counted its numbers in ways that would have seemed impossible a year earlier.
