Jian Chen looked at his hands. They were flesh again, not the glittering violet crystal of the mental hall. He flexed his fingers, the joints popping, the sensation of bone and muscle returning in a rush of overwhelming reality. He looked at Dale on the cot.The cooper was silent, his chest rising and falling in a natural, steady rhythm. The mechanical whine was gone. The unnatural stillness of his limbs had softened into the quiet weight of sleep."He’s still alive," Jian Chen murmured, the realization washing over him."He’s sleeping," Ruoxi added, her voice heavy with fatigue. "His metrics... they're completely normal. It’s like the infection just... evaporated."Jian Chen climbed off the stool, his legs feeling like they belonged to someone else. He walked to the window, peering out at the village square. The flicker was gone. The fence post he had seen earlier was now solid, unchanging. The oak tree stood tal

"Half the storehouse has gone grey. The dried meat in the rafters has turned into flat, grey blocks with no taste. The water in the barrels is turning into that greasy static we saw at the North Gate. We can't eat this, Lord Chen. We can't feed the children on wireframes.""The Null-Space is expanding," Ruoxi explained, her fingers tapping nervously on her brass instruments. "The deletion command Lin Fan initiated didn't stop when we broke the spire. It’s like a slow-moving stain. It’s eating the physical properties of the assets within the valley. The wood is losing its weight, the food is losing its nutrition, and the water is losing its wetness.""We have forty-two days of food," Jian Chen remembered Lin Fan’s words. "He was right.""He was right about the math," Garret said, his eyes flashing with a sudden, dark fire. "But he was wrong about us. We aren't going to sit here and turn into grey sand, Lord Chen. If the valley is dying, we g