Smaller veins from beneath the southern forest curved unnaturally backward. Even energy moving through underground water was being stripped gradually from its natural route and dragged toward the same location. Sage had initially imagined an enormous reservoir waiting below, something absorbing the mana and storing it.
He had been wrong.
The mana wasn't simply collecting.
It was building.
At first Sage couldn't understand what he was seeing. There was no cavern at the convergence point, no buried temple and no enormous creature waiting beneath Greyfen.
Instead, mana was gathering inside solid earth where nothing should have existed, forming geometric layers that overlapped without obeying the surrounding physical terrain.
Sage narrowed his eyes and pushed harder. The image sharpened, and his breathing stopped.
There was space where there shouldn't have been space.
The surrounding stone had not been excavated or displaced. It simply ceased to matter near the center.
