Chapter 67 The Lingering Static

• The psychic backlash from the Shadow Weaver in the Nexus of Grand Discourse had been a brutal, soul-searing wave of pure futility, threatening to crush every spark of clarity Elara had fought so desperately to ignite. The Moon-Tear Shard had pulsed violently in her hand, its light flickering, battling against an unseen current of cosmic despair that washed over the entire amphitheater.
• The tactical retreat was less a choice and more a desperate scramble for survival, as the newly awakened scholars in the Nexus, momentarily freed from the Weaver’s intellectual paralysis, succumbed to a fresh, terrifying wave of confusion and fragmented despair, their nascent insights quickly buried under a new avalanche of existential dread.
• Elara and her team moved like wraiths through the dissolving order of The Scholar-Sanctum of Veridia. The initial ripples of chaos that followed The Harmonizer's fall in Aeridor were now mirrored here, though with a distinct Veridian flavor.