CHAPTER 206
### The Hollow Again
Wang Fei was at the hollow's edge when they arrived.
She had been there for five days.
She looked at Jian Yu.
At the grey blade.
"You felt it from ninety li," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"The vertical direction," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the hollow.
"It started the day after the One Continuous Project document distributed through the network," she said.
He looked at her.
"The document," she said. "Forty-seven pages. Every practitioner named. Every contribution acknowledged. Every phase of the project documented."
"Yes," he said.
"The hollow started deepening the day after every practitioner in the network received it," she said.
He thought about this.
The One Continuous Project distribution.
Every practitioner who had contributed receiving their name in the same document.
Every practitioner understanding for the first time the full scope of what they had been part of.
The elder in Raohe.
The spring community.
The farming families.
Wei Lan's lineage.
Rong Yan.
Pei Song.
All of them reading the document.
All of them understanding.
All of them at that moment recognizing what they were part of.
And the hollow deepening.
"The recognition," he said slowly.
Wang Fei looked at him.
"The hollow responds when the between quality in suppressed cultivation contacts the source," he said. "Rong Yan's seven practitioners sitting at the edge — the hollow deepened four percent."
"Yes," Wang Fei said.
"The One Continuous Project distribution was two hundred practitioners reading the document and recognizing what they had been building," he said. "Two hundred people's between quality — not suppressed, not explicit, but present in the recognition of the work — all reading the same document at the same time."
"And the hollow felt it," Wang Fei said.
"The source responded to two hundred practitioners recognizing the project simultaneously," he said.
Wang Fei was quiet.
"How much did it deepen," Bing Xi said. She had the Frostbite Edge extended.
She read.
She was quiet for a long time.
Long enough that he began reading himself through the domain.
He reestablished the thread.
Twenty breaths.
He pushed to twenty-one.
He reached for the hollow's lower layer.
The continuous frequency was at the surface.
Below it —
He reached.
Twenty-two breaths.
Something was there.
Not below the continuous frequency in the way of a deeper layer.
Integrated into it.
The continuous frequency had deepened to the point where it had reached something that had always been there but had been below the hollow's natural conducting depth.
Something older than the continuous frequency.
Older than River-Stone.
Older than the pre-Dao Shen attempts.
The oldest layer.
The thing that the archive's blank entry had been pointing toward.
What was in the world before the words for it.
He held twenty-two breaths.
He held the thread.
He held the grey blade.
The between quality in the dantian and the sword and the domain reached through the thread toward the oldest layer in the hollow's depth.
The layer reached back.
Not recognition.
Something before recognition.
Something so old it did not recognize in the way of individual things recognizing each other.
It simply — was.
And the between quality was simply — with it.
He released.
He sat down at the hollow's edge.
He sat beside Wang Fei.
He looked at the hollow.
"What is it," she said.
He held eighteen breaths.
He counted to twenty-two.
"I do not have a word for it yet," he said.
She looked at the hollow.
"Before the words," she said.
"Yes," he said.
She looked at the hollow.
He looked at the hollow.
Lin Mei sat on his other side.
She did not write.
She did not read his cultivation condition.
She sat.
The hollow was quiet.
The between quality in the lower layer was present and ancient and had no name yet and was doing what the between always did.
Being what was in the space between things that other things could not occupy.
Waiting for the right person to sit at its edge.
They were sitting.
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