The inverted intent wave didn’t stop at Sword #0002.
Having received what it interpreted as a valid completion signal from Sword #0001, Sword #0002 dutifully prepared its own status report. But the reflected wave had reversed its phase flow-charge. Because of that, Sword #0002’s output settings were fully corrupted. Instead of advancing to target map points (X, Y, Z - 1), its flight path vector pointed backward into the space occupied by Sword #0001.
Sword #0002 sent its updated map points back to Sword #0001.
Sword #0001, still resting against the shiny facet of Lin Tao’s star-white-gold needle, received the packet from Sword #0002. Under normal operation, a parent blade never receives a command from a child blade. It only receives confirmation of termination.
However, Du Cang’s formation had been authored three hundred years ago using legacy looping templates copied from ancient Precursor scrolls. To the ancient fighters of the Heavenly Sword Sect, these scrolls were treated as divine revelations from the immortals. They copied the runic call structures character by character, engraving them onto spirit swords without comprehending the underlying calculating principles. They didn’t understand that the Precursor engineers who designed the template had included self-running error-recovery routines meant for fault-tolerant self-running defense arrays.
