The marketplace stretched endlessly in all directions.
Kai long vanished into the swarm, his parting words still echoing in her head. But the system didn't give her time to think about them. The moment he left, the threads surged again—like the space had taken a breath while he was speaking and now exhaled everything all at once.
Voices slammed through the network, some vocal, some thought-encoded, most garbled in compressed transaction strings.
Every conversation overlapped.
Every deal bled into the next.
And beneath it all was that low, thrumming tension—like something dangerous coiled just beneath the surface.
Ava shifted her stance and moved forward. The structure of the place was fluid, responsive to motion but never quite stable. Every step landed on a new platform—hexagonal tiles of glowing data underfoot. The stalls shifted too, folding and unfolding like they were running on randomized algorithms.
