A week after the barrier reached full integrity, the city produced its first indication that it knew something had changed.
Not through official channels. Not through any announcement or guild report or academy classification update. Through the specific, untrackable mechanism of collective human experience registering a shift in the environment that couldn't be named but could be felt.
Lower district residents who had been living with the low-grade tension of elevated ambient mana for years began to describe the air as quieter. Guild training halls in the western sector reported that compression failures had dropped to negligible levels without any change in their protocols. A clinic in the industrial district that had been managing channel overload cases for the better part of a decade found its intake reduced to near zero and had no explanation to offer.
The passive field held its schematic configuration.
