Red emergency lights bathed Jasmine's chamber as the quantum field surged with unprecedented energy. Through her neural interface, she could sense Queen Eleanor's increasingly desperate attempts to contain the crystal egg's escalating power in Eldoria.
"The containment fields are failing," Eleanor's transmission cut through the chaos. "Whatever's awakening – it's using my technology as some kind of conduit."
In Viscine, Denise's shadow network was fragmenting, each node pulsing with the same crimson rhythm as the crystal egg. For once, her sister's voice held no trace of calculated ambition, only raw urgency: "The genetic markers in my test subjects are mutating. This isn't the evolution I planned. This is something else."