Depth creates comfort.
Comfort creates concentration.
Concentration creates fragility.
The basin held.
But Maya wasn't measuring curvature anymore.
She was measuring crowding.
"Stability increases participation," she said quietly.
"And participation increases coupling."
Across New York City, systematic funds increased exposure within the well.
In London, discretionary managers reclassified the move from tactical to structural.
In Singapore, macro desks removed hedge overlays that no longer paid.
The basin deepened.
But its walls narrowed.
Keith ran concentration metrics.
Liquidity was abundant in direction.
Sparse against it.
That asymmetry was new.
"Order books are thick," he said.
"But only on one side."
Maya nodded.
"A deep well with steep walls."
She projected the energy surface again—this time not to show stability, but sensitivity.
Force equals negative gradient.
The steeper the slope,
the stronger the restoring push.
But near the lip of a narrow well—
Gradient can change abruptly.
In Chicago, options gamma flipped sign at a tighter interval than last week.
In Frankfurt, credit correlation matrices showed clustering intensifying across sectors previously unlinked.
In Tokyo, cross-border capital flows became synchronized.
Coupling increased.
Independence decreased.
Jasmine overlaid participation heat maps.
The basin was no longer just deep.
It was crowded.
She calculated the aggregate sensitivity of positioning to small shocks.
Her model output one word:
Nonlinear.
Maya formalized it.
Second derivative.
Curvature defines stability.
But concentration amplifies impact.
When too much mass occupies the same region of state space, even small perturbations propagate.
Late session in Hong Kong, a minor liquidity withdrawal caused price to slide faster than models predicted.
It was not large.
But it was swift.
Not instability.
Acceleration.
Keith stared at the replay.
"The slope hasn't changed," he said.
"No," Maya replied.
"But the mass has."
She wrote it explicitly:
Same force.
Greater mass.
Different response.
The basin had achieved critical density.
Participants now depended on the stability of others.
Feedback loops shortened.
Time-to-impact compressed.
In Zurich, wealth desks issued calm notes reinforcing allocation discipline.
In Washington, D.C., policy commentary remained neutral.
Nothing externally disruptive.
Yet internally—
Sensitivity increased.
Maya summarized the shift.
"We're stable," she said.
"But metastable."
The well remains deep.
Escape energy remains high.
But local disturbances no longer dissipate smoothly.
They travel.
Because mass is aligned.
Because exposure is shared.
Because equilibrium has become consensus.
Critical mass does not imply collapse.
It implies amplification.
A small push, once absorbed quietly, now echoes across desks, geographies, instruments.
The basin is strong—
But resonance risk has emerged.
Chapter 185 closes not with rupture—
But with density.
Stability has matured into alignment.
Alignment into crowding.
Crowding into latent energy.
The system rests in its valley.
Comfortable.
Concentrated.
Responsive.
And when systems become this synchronized,
It is not the depth that matters most—
It is how tightly packed the occupants are at the bottom.