Borrowed Eyes, Borrowed Time
The formation-key projected a map of the western chain network into the narrow column of Ye Chen's remaining vision.
He had to press his face six inches from the projection to read it — the formation-script amplified by the key's structural perception until each character resolved through the fragment's translation of the world as architecture. The map showed seventeen nodes in the western Wastes, connected by corridors of Qi-flow that pulsed with the chain network's dying rhythm. Six nodes glowed amber — below thirty percent efficiency, degrading. Four nodes had gone dark entirely — destroyed, the formation-script's diagnostic layer marking them with the structural signature of parasitic corrosion. The remaining seven were the ones Ye Chen had maintained during the past weeks. Their green glow was brighter than the others, but the brightness was fading already, the repair work slowly unraveling as the Preservers' modifications continued their work from the inside.
He could not see the map. He could read the map. The difference was the distance between a finger-and-a-half of projected formation-script and the world that existed beyond its edges — a world of gray shapes and ambient light that his degraded visual cortex no longer decoded into anything useful. The map was all he had. The map and the relay's standby light, a blue-white smear on the far wall, and the shape of Fang Rui's body across the table, registered through Qi-vibration as a seated figure whose pulse-pattern carried the steady rhythm Ye Chen had come to recognize as listening without interrupting.
The pain in his eyes was less than it had been an hour ago.
Not gone — the hold's currency was retreating slowly, not vanishing. But the ache that had settled into his orbital bones during the three-hour transmission had thinned to a dull pressure, the way a bruise thins from black to yellow over days. Pain was the last sense the fragment had not consumed. It was being consumed now, the hold's price drawing from it like water from a cistern, each sip thinning the cistern's reserves by a fraction that compounded over hours. In another day, the dull pressure would become a memory. In three days, he would not remember what eye-ache felt like.
He straightened from the projection and the map shrank to its original proportions — a column of light hanging in the gray, readable only at arm's length. The waystation's main room surrounded him in shapes he navigated by Qi-vibration: table, chairs, relay panel, supply cache. The formation arrays along the walls hummed their ancient, stressed song — a low vibration his meridian lattice decoded as the sound of infrastructure running on borrowed Qi.
The bone-resonance link shifted to the pattern Fang Rui used when he had been thinking for a while and was ready to speak.
The translation came as structured vibration against Ye Chen's forearm, the pill refiner's palm resting on the link's contact point: Three options. I have mapped them. Do you want them sequentially or all at once?
Ye Chen pressed his palm back. The link carried the response through their shared vocabulary — a pattern that meant all at once, but slowly.
Fang Rui adjusted his frequency. The link's bandwidth narrowed, carrying one stream of spatial-emotional data at a time, each packet held for two breaths before the next arrived.
The first option materialized as a directional impression — west, deeper into the Wastes, the chain network's corridors vanishing into chaotic Qi territory where surveillance formations could not follow. The bone-resonance translated the concept: Abandon the waystation. Move into the deep Wastes where the Qi environment masks all signatures. The Preservers cannot track us there. But maintenance is impossible — the nodes in the deep Wastes are too degraded, too scattered, too embedded in parasitic territory. We gain safety. We lose the chain.
Ye Chen processed the impression for three breaths. The first option was flight. It was the option Wei He had chosen when the Silent Peak fell — running to Ashen Creek, hiding in a frontier village, spending thirty years recovering from the knowledge of what he had seen. Wei He had survived. The chains had not benefited.
The second option arrived as a positional impression — stay, hold the waystation, fortify its remaining formation arrays, and wait. The link carried the rationale: the fragment holders were converging on Frost Moon Palace. Ling Yue was coordinating. Xue Linglong was defending. The vote needed seven bearers, not a maintenance worker. If Ye Chen stayed here and continued to repair chain nodes, his sight would be gone within weeks. If he stayed and stopped repairing — letting the formation arrays maintain what they could — he would be blind before the holders gathered. Either way, the waystation became a tomb with a communication relay.
The second option was surrender dressed in patience.
The third option arrived as a directional impression — east, toward Frost Moon Palace, the continent's active Qi-flow carrying their signatures along established corridors. The link carried Fang Rui's strongest argument: The Voting Protocol requires seven bearers. You are one. Your sight is the bottleneck — not the chain network's stability, not the Preservers' sabotage, not the parasites. You. If you lose your sight entirely, you cannot read formation script. You cannot maintain nodes. You cannot contribute to the vote through the formation-key's amplification. Every day you spend here is a day closer to the point where you cannot perform the function you came to perform. The race east is not abandonment. It is prioritization.
The link paused. The pulse-pattern shifted to the frequency Fang Rui reserved for the things he believed most deeply but said least often — the frequency that carried the weight of a pill refiner who had watched his friend lose five senses and a piece of the world's infrastructure to hold together, and who had been counting the arithmetic of loss with the precision of someone who understood that some debts compound faster than others.
We go east. Ling Yue coordinates. Wei Lingyi provides institutional support. The chain network survives on its remaining stability long enough for the vote. You arrive with your sight — what remains of it — and the formation-key. You arrive as the Seventh Fragment's bearer, not as a maintenance worker who went blind fixing infrastructure that the bearers themselves will decide to keep or destroy.
The third option was the option Ye Chen did not want.
He stood in the waystation's main room, his finger-and-a-half tunnel of vision fixed on the formation-key's projection, and held the three options in his mind the way the fragment held the world's architecture — as structural concepts, each with load-bearing walls and weak points. The map's green-glowing nodes pulsed in his visual field. Six nodes he had repaired. Six nodes whose repair had cost him fractions of sight that would not return. Six nodes that served a population he had walked through three weeks ago — Granny Zhao's settlement at the Wastes' edge, thirty families breathing clean Qi because a chain-link point held, because a formation array maintained, because a boy with numb hands pressed a key to a node and gave it the Reconstruction it needed to stand for another few months.
He shaped his response through the bone-resonance link. The pattern was complex — the vocabulary they had built did not carry long arguments, only structural impressions. He built it in three parts.
The first part: a directional impression aimed at the western nodes, paired with the vibration-pattern for children — the pattern Fang Rui had developed for the settlement at the Wastes' edge, the children whose spiritual sickness had cleared when Ye Chen stabilized their chain-link point. The pattern carried spatial data: the settlement was four days west. The nearest degraded node was six hours west. Without maintenance, the node would collapse within two weeks. Without the node, the settlement's Qi environment would destabilize within a month. Spiritual sickness would return. The farmer's numb hands would go numb again. The children would cough.
The second part: a structural impression of the chain network's current state — the amber nodes, the dark nodes, the green nodes fading. The link carried the concept: The network is not stable. The Preservers' sabotage is collapsing nodes faster than they degrade naturally. The remaining stability is an illusion created by the nodes I have already repaired, and those repairs are temporary. Without ongoing maintenance, the western sector collapses within weeks. The collapse propagates eastward. The frontier settlements between here and the central continent — dozens of them, thousands of people — experience cascading spiritual sickness as the chain infrastructure beneath them fails.
The third part: a vibration-pattern that held for five breaths — the longest single impression Ye Chen had ever sent through the link. It carried no spatial data, no directional argument, no structural analysis. It carried the weight of a boy who had watched a mountain die because people chose to run instead of hold, who had carried a formation manual with margin annotations from a man who had spent thirty years watching and waiting, who had pressed his numb palm to the earth and felt nothing while the world trembled beneath him.
The chain network is not an abstraction. It is the thing that keeps people alive.
The link held the impression for five breaths. Then it faded, leaving the pulse-pattern of Fang Rui's heartbeat as the only remaining signal.
Silence. Not the conversion-pill silence of translated sound, but the bone-resonance silence of two people who had said what they needed to say and were waiting for the other to answer.
Fang Rui's heartbeat carried a pattern Ye Chen had not felt before — a rhythm that was not steady, not the reliable seventy-eight-beats-per-minute that the conversion pill had rendered as a warm drum. This rhythm was irregular: three beats close together, a pause, two beats, a longer pause, four beats at a pace that the link decoded as the Qi-signature of a person processing an argument they could not refute.
The pill refiner's palm withdrew from the contact point on Ye Chen's forearm. The bone-resonance link thinned to passive mode — spatial data, proximity, the heartbeat at three paces across the table. Fang Rui was not responding. He was sitting with the argument and turning it over with the same methodical precision he applied to pill formulas — testing each component against the others, checking the ratios, examining the formula for hidden interactions that would destabilize the result.
Ye Chen waited. The formation-key's projection hung in his vision. The relay's standby light glowed on the far wall. The chain network hummed beneath the continent's skin.
The link shifted to active mode. Fang Rui's palm returned to the contact point. The pattern he transmitted was not an argument. It was a concession — structured as a pulse that the link's vocabulary rendered as the equivalent of you are correct and I do not know what to do about it.
Then a second pattern, layered beneath the first: the vibration-impression for risk — the pattern that meant the situation contained variables they could not control. The link carried the subtext: You are right about the settlements. You are right about the network. But the equation has a variable you are not accounting for.
A third pattern. The vibration-impression for eyes — the shorthand they had developed for Ye Chen's deteriorating vision. The link translated: If you stay and maintain, you will be blind within weeks. A blind man cannot read formation script. A blind man cannot press the formation-key to a node and channel Reconstruction into degraded arrays. The maintenance you are arguing for will consume the tool you are arguing with.
Ye Chen felt the argument settle against him — not as a physical force, but as the structural recognition that Fang Rui had identified the load-bearing weakness in his reasoning. The chain network needed maintenance. The maintenance required sight. His sight was failing. The arithmetic was simple and merciless: every pass narrowed the tunnel. Every node stabilized cost a sliver of vision he could not recover. He had mapped twelve more nodes on the Bureau disk's western route. He had perhaps three to six passes of functional formation-script reading remaining. After that, the key's amplification would not compensate. He would be unable to read the script. Unable to repair the arrays. A maintenance worker who could not maintain.
The chain network needed him functional. The vote needed him functional. And the maintenance he was arguing for was consuming the function the chain and the vote required.
He sat in the gray room with the formation-key's projection burning in his narrowed visual field and felt the two arguments press against each other like formation arrays in a compression test — each one structurally sound, each one loading the other with force it could not sustain. The frontier settlements needed the chains. The chains needed the vote. The vote needed the Seventh Fragment's bearer. The bearer's sight was dying.
The link hummed. Fang Rui's heartbeat carried the irregular pattern of a man who had arrived at a conclusion he did not want to state but would state anyway, because the situation required honesty and the bone-resonance link did not permit evasion.
The pattern arrived: We cannot resolve this tonight. The relay is at twelve percent. The formation-key's broadcast has exposed our position. The Preservers know we are here. We need to decide by dawn, or the decision will be made for us.
Ye Chen pressed his palm to the table. The wood's texture — he could not feel it, but the Qi-vibration registered its grain, its age, the way the formation-stone beneath had been cut by hands a thousand years ago. The table was part of the chain network's infrastructure. Everything in the waystation was part of the infrastructure. The relay, the arrays, the walls, the floor, the table where two people sat debating the fate of a continent-sized formation that had been holding the world together since before either of them was born.
He shaped his response through the link. Not an argument. A pattern that meant: I hear you. I am thinking.
Fang Rui's heartbeat answered with the steady pattern that meant: I will wait.
The debate resumed an hour later.
Ye Chen had used the interval to study the formation-key's projection more carefully, pressing his face to the column of light and reading the diagnostic data that the relay had compiled during their weeks of absence. The data was incomplete — the relay had been operating at degraded capacity, its monitoring arrays unable to cover the full range of the western chain network — but it provided three pieces of information that changed the equation.
The first: the Preservers' chain-disruption arrays, which Wei Lingyi had warned about in her intelligence reports from Frost Moon Palace, were not limited to the central continent. The relay's diagnostic layer had detected disruption signatures at two nodes in the western Wastes — nodes that Ye Chen had not maintained, nodes that had gone dark not from parasitic corrosion but from the specific Qi-frequency of Preserver remote-disruption technology. The Preservers were not just weakening the chains from within the Bureau. They were actively collapsing nodes across the continent, using Sovereign-realm arrays to target chain infrastructure that Bureau Originalists had spent centuries maintaining. The western Wastes, which Ye Chen had assumed were too remote for Preserver attention, were within their operational range.
The second: the disruption signatures carried temporal data — the relay's monitoring arrays had recorded the timestamps of each node's failure. The two western nodes had collapsed within forty-eight hours of each other, three weeks ago. The timing coincided with Ling Yue's second report — the Preserver assault on Frost Moon Palace's chain-link node. The Preservers were not randomly targeting nodes. They were executing a coordinated campaign, striking multiple chain infrastructure targets simultaneously across the continent. The western Wastes were not a secondary theater. They were part of the same offensive.
The third: the relay's diagnostic layer had detected a Qi-signature moving through the western chain corridors — not a Preserver patrol, not a parasitic entity, but a formation-marked individual using Bureau-Originalist navigation protocols. The signature had appeared twelve hours ago, moving west through the chain network at speeds that the diagnostic layer estimated at Nascent Soul or above. The signature's trajectory pointed toward the waystation.
Ye Chen read the diagnostic data through the formation-key's amplification, each line resolved by the fragment's structural perception into meaning that bypassed his degraded eyes. The three pieces of information rearranged the debate's architecture.
He transmitted the data through the bone-resonance link — not the raw diagnostic text, but the structural impressions it carried. Fang Rui's palm rested on the contact point, receiving the spatial-formation data and processing it with the analytical precision that made him Ye Chen's most essential ally in the field.
The first impression: Preserver disruption in the western Wastes. The link carried the concept's weight — the enemy is already here, and the nodes you are arguing to maintain may already be beyond repair.
The second impression: coordinated campaign. The link translated the temporal correlation — the attacks are not random. They are a single operation, executed across the continent. The western nodes are part of a larger strategy.
The third impression: a Nascent Soul signature approaching from the east. Bureau-Originalist coding. The link carried the directional data and the timeline — twelve hours ago, heading this way.
Fang Rui's heartbeat shifted to the pattern Ye Chen recognized as rapid processing. The pill refiner held the contact point for ten breaths, his pulse fluctuating as the three impressions settled into his analytical framework.
Then the response arrived. Not an argument. A question, shaped through the link's most precise frequency:
Originalist or Preserver?
Ye Chen had already asked himself the same question. The formation-key's diagnostic layer had identified the approaching signature as Bureau-Originalist — the same coding that marked the waystation, the relay, and every piece of Bureau infrastructure Wei Lingyi had ever described. But Bureau-Originalist coding did not guarantee Bureau-Originalist allegiance. The Preservers had originated within the Bureau. They used the same formation architecture. A Preserver agent carrying a stolen Originalist frequency could pass through the chain network's diagnostic layer undetected.
Except the approaching signature carried a secondary resonance that the formation-key's deeper diagnostic had flagged: a formation-core signature, cracked but recognizable, encoded in a Qi-frequency that Ye Chen had encountered in the sanctum's corridors. The formation-core's structural fingerprint was unique — no two formation-cores produced identical resonance patterns, the same way no two fingerprints matched.
The approaching signature belonged to Wei Lingyi.
He transmitted the identification through the link. The formation-core fingerprint. The Originalist coding. The Nascent Soul speed.
Fang Rui's heartbeat went still for two beats. Then it resumed at seventy-two — not the elevated seventy-eight of focused concentration, but the slower rhythm of a person who had just received information that required a different kind of processing.
The response came as a single impression: She is alive.
Not a question. The link did not carry questions in that frequency. It carried the structural recognition of a fact that should not have been possible — Wei Lingyi, sealed in the sanctum's collapsed corridor, trapped beneath a continent of corrupted chains, should not have been moving through the western Wastes at Nascent Soul speed. The corridor had collapsed. The formation arrays had failed. The chain infrastructure above the convergence point had been severed by the Preserver destabilization cascade. She should have been dead.
She was not dead.
The link held the impression of Fang Rui's surprise for three breaths. Then the analytical frequency resumed — the pill refiner's mind already turning the new variable into the equation's existing terms.
If she is alive and coming here, she brings intelligence. We need to know what she knows before we decide.
Ye Chen agreed. The debate's architecture shifted — three options remained, but the variables had changed. A Bureau elder arriving at the waystation with fresh intelligence from the sanctum's collapse would provide data the diagnostic layer could not: the state of the chain network beneath the central continent, the Preservers' operational capabilities, the status of the other fragment holders. The decision could not be made until the data was complete.
He shaped his response through the link: We wait. She will arrive within hours. We hear what she carries. Then we decide.
Fang Rui's heartbeat answered with the pattern that meant agreement — but layered beneath it, the irregular rhythm that meant I am not comfortable with this but I trust your judgment.
The relay's standby light glowed on the far wall. The formation-key's projection hung in the gray of Ye Chen's visual field. The chain network hummed its dying song beneath the continent's skin.
They waited.
The formation-key's alarm function activated at the midpoint between midnight and dawn.
The alarm was not a sound — Ye Chen's hearing had been gone for months. It was a structural vibration that the formation-key transmitted through its contact with his chest, a resonance pattern that his meridian lattice decoded into the formation-script equivalent of a warning: a sustained pulse at the frequency the Bureau designated for approaching-Qi-signature alerts. The key's projection expanded in his narrowed visual field, the formation-script resolving into a diagnostic display that the fragment translated into meaning.
The approaching signature had entered the waystation's detection range — the outer boundary of the Bureau formation arrays that surrounded the waystation like a net of spiritual threads. The signature's Qi-density was consistent with Nascent Soul cultivation. Its trajectory was direct — not circling, not testing, not the indirect approach of a patrol. The signature was moving in a straight line from the east, through the chain network's corridors, toward the waystation's entrance.
The formation-key's diagnostic layer performed a resonance match. The result appeared in Ye Chen's visual field as formation-script that he read at arm's length, each character amplified by the key's projection:
PRIMARY MATCH: BUREAU-ORIGINALIST CODING — 94.7% CONFIDENCE SECONDARY MATCH: FORMATION-CORE SIGNATURE — LIU WEILINGYI (CRACKED, DEPLETED) ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 4 HOURS, 23 MINUTES SPEED: NASCENT SOUL EARLY — MAXIMUM SUSTAINED VELOCITY STATUS: APPROACHING WITHOUT DEVIATION
Wei Lingyi.
Four hours and twenty-three minutes. Moving at the speed of a Sovereign-realm cultivator pushing her remaining Qi reserves through the chain network's corridors, navigating the spatial distortions and parasitic corridors with the Bureau training that had kept her alive for decades. She was coming here — not to the chain network's deepest convergence point, not to Frost Moon Palace, not to the Bureau's scattered Originalist cells. To this waystation. To the relay whose diagnostic signature she would have detected through the chain network's originalist frequency. To the location of the formation-key's broadcast, which had made Ye Chen's position known to every Qi-sensitive system on the continent.
She was coming to the Seventh Fragment's bearer.
The formation-key's projection shifted — the diagnostic display replaced by an incoming-signal interface, a new function that activated when the key detected an approaching signature carrying Bureau-Originalist resonance. The interface displayed the approaching signature's transmission queue: a single queued message, encoded in formation-script, pending the key's authentication.
Ye Chen pressed the formation-key to the activation surface of the relay's control panel. The authentication completed — the key's resonance matching the relay's Bureau-Originalist coding at the quantum level. The queued message unlocked.
A single word in formation-script, projected into Ye Chen's visual field by the key's amplification:
HOLD.
Not a greeting. Not a report. Not a request. A command — transmitted through the Bureau's originalist frequency, encoded with the authority of a Bureau elder whose formation-core, though cracked and depleted, still carried the institutional weight of a thousand-year-old organization.
Hold.
Hold position. Hold the waystation. Hold the relay. Hold the chain network's western terminus, whose maintenance data Ye Chen had transmitted three hours ago, whose infrastructure was degrading beneath the weight of Preserver sabotage and parasitic corrosion.
Hold.
The word occupied Ye Chen's visual field — a single character in formation-script, amplified by the key's projection into the only thing his finger-and-a-half tunnel of vision could see. The character was Bureau-standard, its strokes clean despite the urgency of its transmission. Wei Lingyi had taken the time to encode a proper formation-script message, even while moving at maximum speed through corrupted chain corridors. She had not sent a fragment of raw data, not a compressed Qi-pulse, not the kind of abbreviated signal that a desperate person transmits when time is the scarcest resource. She had sent a word. A single, deliberate, precisely formatted word.
Hold.
The relay's standby light pulsed once — the diagnostic layer acknowledging the incoming signature's proximity. Four hours and twenty-three minutes. Not a long time. Not a short time. Enough time for Ye Chen and Fang Rui to prepare the waystation for an arrival they could not have predicted, to process the implications of a Bureau elder emerging from the sanctum's collapse with intelligence that would reshape the debate they had been conducting across the table for the past six hours.
Enough time for the debate to continue with new data.
Fang Rui's bone-resonance link shifted to the pattern for I felt that. The formation-key's alarm vibration had resonated through the waystation's formation-stone, and the pill refiner's meridian lattice had decoded the same structural pulse that Ye Chen had received. His palm rested on the contact point.
The response came as a structured impression: Wei Lingyi. Alive. Approaching. She carries intelligence.
Then a second impression, layered with the pattern for urgency: Four hours. We need to prepare.
Ye Chen pressed his palm to the table. The wood's Qi-vibration registered beneath his numb fingers — the same table where they had debated three options and arrived at no resolution, the same table where the formation-key had projected the map of a dying chain network and the same relay whose standby light had been the only point of light in the gray room.
The debate was not resolved. The three options still sat in the room like formation arrays in compression — each one structurally sound, each one loading the others with force they could not sustain. The Preservers' coordinated campaign was not a future threat. It was a present reality, two western nodes already dark, the chain network's degradation accelerating beyond what maintenance could repair. The settlements needed the chains. The chains needed the vote. The vote needed the bearer. The bearer's sight was dying.
But the debate had a new variable. Wei Lingyi was alive. She was coming. She carried intelligence from the sanctum's collapse — intelligence that could tip the equation's balance in a direction neither Ye Chen nor Fang Rui had calculated.
He shaped his response through the link. The pattern was simple — the one they used when a decision had been reached and the time for deliberation had passed.
Prepare the waystation. Check the barrier's power reserves. Clear the supply cache for a guest who will arrive damaged. She is coming, and we need to hear what she carries.
Fang Rui's heartbeat shifted to the pattern of immediate action — the irregular rhythm accelerating to eighty-two beats per minute as the pill refiner rose from the table and moved toward the supply cache. The bone-resonance link carried his spatial updates: cache contents — Qi-replenishing pills, dried rations, Bureau-standard formation repair materials. Barrier power — twelve percent, insufficient for defense but adequate for detection. Relay power — twelve percent, one short transmission remaining.
Ye Chen stood in the waystation's main room with the formation-key's projection hanging in his visual field. The single word — HOLD — occupied the center of his narrowed vision, each character amplified by the key's projection into the only thing his degraded eyes could process. The word was Bureau-standard. It was not a suggestion. It was not a request. It was the command of a woman who had spent a thousand years maintaining an infrastructure that was dying beneath the weight of institutional betrayal, who had survived the sanctum's collapse and navigated corrupted corridors for three weeks to reach this waystation, who had transmitted a single word as her opening statement because the situation did not permit pleasantries.
Hold.
Ye Chen held.
The formation-key hummed against his chest. The chain network pulsed beneath the continent's skin. The relay's standby light glowed in the gray. And somewhere in the eastern Wastes, four hours and twenty-three minutes away, a cracked formation-core and depleted Qi reserves carried a Bureau elder toward the waystation where two people sat with a dying map and an argument that had no clean answer.
The bone-resonance link carried Fang Rui's spatial updates as the pill refiner prepared the waystation — the supply cache being rearranged, the barrier being checked, the relay being readied for a guest whose Qi-signature would trigger its detection arrays. The work was efficient, methodical, the work of a man who had learned to prepare for arrivals that might change everything.
The formation-key's projection displayed the countdown. Four hours. Twenty-two minutes. Twenty-one.
Ye Chen pressed his palm to the table and held the HOLD in his narrowed vision — a single word in formation-script, the Bureau's originalist frequency encoded in its strokes, the authority of a thousand years of institutional maintenance compressed into four characters.
He held.
Outside, the Wastes' Qi-currents stirred against the waystation's walls. The wind — he could not hear it, but the Qi-vibration registered its pressure against the formation-stone, a slow, lateral force that his meridian lattice decoded as east-to-west air movement carrying moisture from the frontier's rivers. The wind had not changed. The wind would not change. It would blow across the Wastes and the frontier regardless of what happened in this room, regardless of what Wei Lingyi carried, regardless of what the vote decided or the chains held or the Preservers destroyed.
The wind was not listening. The wind did not hold.
But the chain network did. The chain network listened, and held, and hummed its dying song beneath the continent's skin while a formation-key projected a single word into the visual field of a boy who could not see the world beyond it but could read the word, and understood the command, and chose to obey it.
Four hours. Twenty minutes.
The relay's standby light pulsed.
The chain network held.