Claire smoothed the wrinkled parchment across the cauldron’s warm bronze rim.
Her ink brush moved with steady precision, tracing three overlapping circles over the diagram of a dormant winter root.
“The frost lotus survives ten years under mountain ice,” Claire said softly. “It stops drawing water. It ceases all respiration.”
Kaelen Vance leaned against the stone balustrade, watching the numbers spin inside his mind.
Forty minutes remained on his 43,210x Quad-Combo window.
In real time, forty minutes seemed like a brief morning pause between cups of tea.
Under the compressed multiplier, each minute contained forty-three thousand two hundred and ten baseline hours.
Forty minutes equaled one million seven hundred twenty-eight thousand four hundred hours.
