Minh Truong felt it before he saw it.
The blind zone near the underpass was gone.
Not physically—its concrete walls still stood, graffiti unchanged, lights still flickering weakly. But the moment Minh Truong stepped beneath the arch, the interface snapped into clarity.
Too clear.
Lifespans loaded instantly.
Residue layers thickened.
Observer pressure returned like a hand closing around his chest.
The system was watching here again.
Actively.
Minh Truong stopped mid-step.
Yesterday, this place had resisted observation. Today, it welcomed it.
At a price.
He scanned the area carefully.
People passed through faster than usual, eyes down, shoulders tense. No one lingered. No one noticed the absence—but Minh Truong did.
The man from the alley was missing.
No data.
No delay.
No gap where he should have been.
Just… nothing.
Minh Truong dismissed the interface and leaned against the cold concrete, pulse steadying.
This wasn't containment.
It was cleanup.
The system responded without being asked.
Not with text.
With behavior.
Across the street, a small crowd had formed—police tape, flashing lights, murmured voices. Minh Truong crossed carefully and stopped at the edge.
An accident, they said.
A fall from the stairs beneath the underpass. No witnesses. No cameras with a clear angle. The man had no identification. No digital footprint anyone could quickly find.
An efficient disappearance.
Minh Truong felt a slow chill spread through his limbs.
Blind zones weren't erased because they were dangerous.
They were erased because they were noticed.
Patterns had formed. Costs had risen. The system had recalculated priorities.
He turned away before anyone could look too closely at him.
That night, his interface pulsed once.
A new line appeared beneath his status—faint, easy to miss.
Exposure Index: Increased
No explanation.
No threshold.
Just a fact.
Minh Truong sat in the dark and let the implication settle.
The system wouldn't hunt anomalies indiscriminately. That would be inefficient. Instead, it would remove nodes—places and people that connected others together.
Isolation before elimination.
He opened a blank map and marked the blind zones he had found so far.
One of them faded.
Then another—dimmed, not gone, but weaker than before.
Minh Truong closed the map.
If he continued alone, the cost curve would rise until the system decided he was cheaper to erase than to observe.
He finally understood the rule he had been circling since Vol 1.
Survival was no longer individual.
It was networked.
And the system had just demonstrated what happened to networks that grew without permission.