If the Lost and Found was a graveyard, the intersection of 5th and Main was a hurricane.
It was noon.
Thousands of people surged across the asphalt, a sea of wool coats, glowing smartphone screens, and hurried footsteps. The "Mundane" was at its peak here.
The smell of burnt coffee and hot brakes was a thick curtain.
Adriana stood on the corner, feeling small. She closed her eyes and reached for her "internal dial," but the Static here was a wall of jagged glass.
The noise of a thousand distracted minds,I'm late, did I lock the door, I need more money, he didn't text back
created a spiritual smog so dense she could barely breathe.
"It's too much," she whispered.
"The noise is the camouflage,"
Vaelen's voice vibrated through the metal of a nearby lamp post.
He didn't manifest fully,the light of the sun was too "heavy" for him here.
"The First Memory isn't hidden in a vault, Adriana. It is hidden in the rhythm.
Find the pulse that doesn't change."
Adriana took a breath and did something counter-intuitive.
She stopped trying to block the noise out. Instead, she let it rush over her.
She looked past the people and focused on the Unseen geometry of the street.
In the spiritual realm, the intersection wasn't just pavement.
It was a massive, swirling vortex of colors. Most of the colors were muddy,the browns of boredom, the sickly greens of envy.
But at the very center of the crosswalk, beneath the feet of a thousand oblivious commuters, there was a tiny, stubborn point of Absolute White.
It was a frequency so pure it made the rest of the city look like a fading photograph.
She stepped into the street.
A taxi honked, the sound tearing through her like a blade, but she didn't flinch.
She reached the center of the intersection just as the light turned red.
The crowd surged around her like water around a stone.
She knelt. To the world, she looked like a woman tying her shoe or having a breakdown.
But Adriana was reaching through the asphalt.
Her fingers didn't hit stone.
They hit something that felt like cool, wet roots.
She pulled, and for a second, the entire city went silent.
The cars stopped.
The birds froze in mid-air.
The "Hardening" cracked.
Out of the ground, she pulled a small, smooth river stone.
It looked like nothing.
But as she held it, she felt the First Memory. She felt the world before the first building was raised.
She felt the breath of the earth when it was still dreaming of forests.
It was the "Source Note"
the wisdom that reminds us we are not separate from the world, but part of its breathing.
"You found it," a voice hissed.
Adriana looked up. The crowd hadn't moved, but their faces had changed.
Every person in the intersection now had the same blank, featureless expression as The Collector. Malphas was using the "Static" of the crowd to manifest a hundred versions of himself.
"Give me the Stone, Weaver," the hundred voices said in unison.
"The world has moved on.
They don't want to remember the earth.
They want the concrete.
They want the silence."
Adriana clutched the stone to her chest.
The "Spirit Note" of the rock began to glow, radiating a warmth that pushed back the grey shadows of the Collector.
"They don't want the silence," Adriana shouted over the rising wind of the Unseen. "They've just forgotten how to speak!"
Suddenly, the stone vibrated, and Adriana realized the stone wasn't just a memory
it was a tuning fork.