The first sign was not the projections or the spatial collapse or any of the things the monitoring equipment was calibrated to catch. The first sign was silence, and it spread through Fengling South the ordinary sound of a district going about its evening simply gone.
Traffic lights froze mid-cycle. A delivery drone stalled thirty meters above the Renhai intersection, its stabilizers whining softly as if waiting for an instruction that had been sent to the wrong address. Pedestrians stopped not by any choice available to them, but because something in the world had momentarily forgotten how to move them.
Then the ground tilted.
Not physically. Not in any way the instruments would register for another forty seconds. But to anyone trained to feel the edge between cognition and existence, between the organized structure the source sea maintained in the world above it and the formlessness pressing against that structure from outside the tilting was unmistakable.
Reality had loosened.
