Chamber Seven [2]
My mana-signature at this moment was the brightest thing in the northeast section of the dungeon, and I was standing three meters away from an entity that had been hungry since the ISS reduced the void-mana concentration five days ago.
I exhaled.
Then I did the thing that the Narrative Sense had shown me, eight seconds into the probable future, was the only thing that had a gold-branch outcome.
I lowered my mana field.
Not to zero — zero would have read as evasion, and the entity was too aware for evasion. But to a level that stopped projecting the ambient draw's characteristic outward-pull quality and started operating in a pure reception mode. Not broadcasting. Receiving.
The entity's dispersal tendrils paused.
In the eight-second thread I had read, the entity responded to the shift by doing something I had not expected when I first read the Narrative Sense output and had spent several days since trying to understand. It responded by reducing its own field.
