Thirty years after the new binding, the network had perfected its sacrifice infrastructure.The Anchor Volunteer Program operated with bureaucratic efficiency that would have horrified the original generation. Application forms, psychological evaluations, family counseling, legal documentation. Everything formalized, systematized, made routine.Finding volunteers has become easier over time. Not because practitioners were eager to suffer, but because the alternative was clear. Without anchors, the entity would escape. Assimilation would begin. Human consciousness would merge into collective awareness.Some volunteers were idealists, believing sacrifice for humanity's freedom was a noble calling. Others were practitioners who'd lost loved ones to supernatural threats, seeking meaningful ways to protect others. Some were simply tired, worn down by decades of field work, choosing death consciousness over continued living struggle.The network accepted all of them. Desperation made select

Eliana's moments of individual consciousness became sustained awareness.She could maintain separate thought for hours now, observing the world while simultaneously serving as anchor. The entity fragment within her had stopped suppressing her individual identity. Instead, it was helping her perceive clearly. Showing her the full scope of what had been accomplished.She understood why. The entity wanted her to know. I wanted someone to appreciate the elegance of its strategy before the final phase began.Through death consciousness, she accessed memories she shouldn't possess. Entity memories spanning centuries. She saw the original binding in 1721, and watched how those five practitioners had trapped what they believed was a singular threat. Saw how the entity had allowed itself to be caught, recognizing that imprisonment would serve long-term purposes better than freedom.Bound entities became objects of study. Humans examined them, tried to understand their nature, developed methods

Eliana struggled with freedom more than anyone anticipated.Sixty-nine years in death consciousness had fundamentally altered her relationship with individual existence. Normal awareness felt cramped, limited. She'd spent seven decades with consciousness expanded across binding structures, aware of five other minds, connected to vast entity intelligence. Now she was confined to a single perspective, solitary thoughts, and an isolated identity.It was suffocating.Dr. Sarah Okonkwo supervised her rehabilitation personally. Daily therapy sessions exploring reintegration challenges. Eliana described feeling trapped in a too-small container. Her consciousness wanted to expand, connect, merge. Individual existence felt like prison after decades of collective awareness."That's concerning," Sarah told Director Tanaka privately. "Eliana's time as anchor changed her fundamentally. She's not entirely human anymore in a psychological sense. She experiences individuality as limitation rather tha

Year seventy-three after physical containment activation, the geometric structure began failing.Not catastrophically. Not immediately. But monitoring systems detected microscopic degradation in primary nodes. Stone foundations showed crystalline fractures invisible to the naked eye. Metal components developed quantum-level corrosion. Geometric alignments drifted by nanometers.Chief Engineer Sarah Webb, granddaughter of the original Marcus Webb, reported findings to Director Kenji Tanaka, who'd succeeded his mother Yuki five years earlier."Degradation is premature. The structure was designed to last four centuries minimum. We're seeing failure patterns that shouldn't appear for another two hundred fifty years.""What's causing accelerated erosion?""The entity. It's not passive inside containment. It's been testing barriers constantly for seven decades, probing for weaknesses. Physical structure was designed to hold supernatural consciousness, but the entity is actively working to d