Word spread faster than anyone anticipated.
The death of Shar'vel was not a secret. The Tribunal's bureaucracy tried to suppress the details, but bridge tier beings felt her passing through the cosmic substrate. Every transitioned being across every sector, every colony, every hidden sanctuary knew what had happened. A being who had successfully escaped the tier system had been dragged back into it and destroyed.
Within days, the request volume for bridge tier status tripled.
Processing centers that had been handling a steady stream of applicants were suddenly overwhelmed. Beings arrived in droves, not because they had planned to transition, but because they were afraid. If the Valorin faction was hunting bridge tier beings, then being a bridge tier being was dangerous. But being a tier-classified being who might want bridge tier status was also dangerous. The only safety was to commit fully—to transition and escape the old system entirely.
