Chapter 3689: The Two Thousand Nine Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Echo: A History Written in Deep Time

It began not with a word, but with a touch.

Elara, her hand resting on the cool, unyielding surface of the demonstration stone, felt not just its texture, but its history.

It was a history written not in words, but in the slow, inexorable language of geological time—a story of pressure, heat, and the patient accretion of minerals.