Temporal aging required something to age in a specific way. What Satou carried inside him was too complex, too multi-layered in its nature, for the temporal field's targeting mechanisms to find a clear point of application.
And the working recognized his presence. He could feel it — not Chronus's awareness specifically, not yet, but the working's own ambient sensitivity registering something anomalous inside its boundary, logging the inconsistency the way any system logged an input it didn't have a processing pathway for.
He knows I'm here, Satou thought. The question is what he does about it.
He kept walking.
—---------------------
The eighty thousand people appeared as he moved deeper.
Not physically — not visible in any conventional sense. But present in the way the working's architecture incorporated them, the way their suspended temporal signatures were woven into the seven-anchor structure as a load-bearing element rather than a consequence of it.
