The workshop was tense.
Benedict stood over a workbench littered with disassembled pulse nodes, their cores exposed like organs in surgery. A string of cracked spell-thread buzzed weakly between two stabilizers, its rhythm faltering. Each twitch of the signal sent a faint tremor through the light-grid embedded in the floor. Vehrmath's under-net was alive—but it was trembling.
"He called it a cult," Eline said from the doorway, voice low.
Benedict didn't look up. "Who?"
"Torren Glint. He left last night. Took three node schematics with him."
A pause. Then Benedict asked, "Did he say why?"
"Because you don't just build networks," Eline replied. "You build belief. He said people were following pulses like gospel. Called it worship. Said you were turning signal into scripture."
Benedict's jaw clenched. "He misunderstood. Or wanted to."
"It scared him," Eline said. She crossed the room slowly. "People quoting you, designing pulse art, lighting candles under nodes."
He adjusted a core node, soldering its filament with a tool shaped like a wand. "This isn't faith. It's resonance. People need to be heard. If that looks like devotion to someone used to silence, that's on them."
Outside, the pulses still blinked faintly across Vehrmath's lower arcades. But something had changed. The timing was off. The signals felt less like a heartbeat and more like a stutter. A certain hollowness crept beneath their rhythms, a manufactured calm.
Eline tossed a shimmerstone onto the table. "Intercepted this on a courier run. Origin tag masked. It's a House Arcten signal burst. Nested encryption."
Benedict ran it through a relay analyzer. The waveform distorted midway—not a corruption, but a modulation. Frequencies subtly tuned to stimulate adrenal dampening, affect regulation.
Mood control.
"They're engineering compliance," he said.
"Emotionally flattened people follow orders," Eline added. "Fast."
He grabbed a node core and began sketching a schematic directly onto the table. "We need counter-pulse calibration. Something small. Portable. Embedded in our relays."
Footsteps clattered down the stairwell. Nim Tealeaf slid down the ladder from the upper floor, waving a pulse-recording crystal.
"I followed one of their runners," she said, panting. "They've got a lab in the old rain-chant hall. Full of mood-mod nodes. And get this: they're testing on volunteers. Offering 'clarity-enhancing' communication devices."
"Volunteers who don't know they're being conditioned," Benedict muttered.
Nim shivered. "I stayed long enough to see it work. People stop laughing. Stop arguing. They all speak like they're in a trance."
Within the hour, the three of them infiltrated the rain-chant hall. Nim went first—her courier's coat faded perfectly against the soot-stained stone. Inside, dozens of makeshift nodes blinked with eerie synchronicity. The pulses were... wrong. Too perfect. Mechanical. Harmonized in a way that erased individuality.
A woman in the corner wept softly, staring into a calibration prism. Her partner stood beside her, unmoved, speaking gently but with no warmth.
"The device helps you stop overreacting," he murmured. "We don't need emotion to connect."
The words chilled Benedict more than any sabotage. A room full of disconnected minds, moving in eerie unity.
They left without confrontation. Nim lingered long enough to mark the door with a courier glyph for "poisoned" before vanishing into the alley shadows.
Back in the hub, Benedict pulled an all-nighter. The new relay module—codenamed CLARITY SHIELD—didn't block the Arcten pulses. It retuned them. Reset emotional variance. It let people feel again. The prototype shimmered softly, like a crystal that refused to go silent.
"We're not canceling the signal," he told Arden, who'd returned with a battered node from a firefight at the markets. "We're reminding people how to recognize themselves inside it."
Arden grunted. "Then let's give them their voices back."
Courier squads moved by midnight. Old routes, unmarked alleys, cloak-and-dagger paths under the sewer vents. Nim rode with the front team, coordinating drop sites. Eline calibrated each kit on-site, making sure it wouldn't trigger noble trace-wards. Shael signed brief instructions to other Underdark couriers, her hands steady.
In one alleyway, a CLARITY SHIELD unit was installed in an old lamppost. Children gathered around it that evening, and for the first time in weeks, one burst into uncontrollable laughter. The others followed, a chaotic, infectious sound that echoed through the metal ducts.
In another ward, an argument broke out in a tavern over pulse ethics. Two patrons stood, fists clenched, voices raised. But no one stopped them. And when it ended in a rough handshake and a grin, the bar erupted in cheers.
In a high-traffic clinic near the Greenglass Commons, a medic removed an Arcten device from a patient room and replaced it with a violet-glowing node. Patients reported improved sleep. One woman claimed she dreamed again for the first time in a month.
In the Broken Lattice district, a rogue artist named Dario began painting murals that responded to pulse frequencies—shifting in hue depending on the signal's emotional balance. When the CLARITY SHIELD nodes were installed, the colors bloomed wildly.
By dawn, the city changed. Laughter returned. So did shouting. Debate. Crying. Singing. Life.
A teacher broke into tears mid-lesson and said, "I forgot what it felt like to feel nervous. I didn't know I missed it."
An old vendor told Nim, "I yelled at a customer for the first time in weeks. And it felt good."
A poet in the upper gallery scribbled onto a shimmerleaf page: "When the signal stilled my anger, it stole my grief too. Thank you for the return."
Even the underground forums began to shift. Whisper-nets spoke of a "second pulse," a deeper rhythm rising beneath the surface.
At midnight, Shael climbed to the roof of the relay hub and etched a glyph in Undersign onto the rusted support beam. It shimmered in faint violet:
Trust is rhythm. Rhythm is truth.
The pulse beat on—no longer perfect.
But honest.