Deep beneath the Central Military Compound, buried within the subterranean Tech Department's monitoring labs.
Fluorescent lights buzzed faintly overhead, illuminating a sea of fatigued engineers and technomancers hunched over consoles, churning through mana signal readings like bureaucratic drones.
Lin Ke, one of the youngest engineers in the room, rubbed his eyes for the fifth time that hour. His coffee was cold, his snack ration untouched, and the blinking graphs across his display had all but blurred together—until something caught his attention.
A line dipped. Not dramatically, not even noticeably to most.
But it dipped consistently.
"…What the hell," he muttered.
He leaned in, running the diagnostic a second time. The mana signature from Sector 4A—the core of the Beijing mana grid—was off. Not broken. Not fluctuating. Just… bleeding. A few dozen mana units at a time. Every seven minutes.
Clockwork precision.
He ran the script again. Same result.
