Location:Dragon estate — Operations Room
Date/Time:5 Frostforge, 9942 AZI
Realm:Lower Realm, Doha
The map covered the entire eastern wall.
Not a map the way Jayde understood maps — not the tactical projections she had built underground, the formation-lit terrain models, the flat brutal geography of a commander working with whatever she had. This was a web. Pins and thread in four colors spreading across the eastern Lower Realm like the root system of something alive, and every pin was a village, and every thread was a connection, and the whole of it had grown for a year without one person outside this house knowing it existed.
Blue for courier routes. Red for supply. Green for trade. Yellow for the arrays.
A hundred and twenty-seven pins. Thirty-four arrays. Eighteen hubs. Eleven medical stations. Seventy-one civilian operatives, and forty-seven more of Xinglong's on separate funding.
Jayde stood in front of it and did not speak for a long time.
"You built this," she said.
