The first descent confirmed what the surface read had shown.
The entity-built anchor points were there. Six of them, positioned along the Rift geometry with a precision that was imperfect in execution but accurate in principle—the entity had understood where the connection points needed to be even without knowledge of what carrier grammar looked like, had built toward those positions over decades of incremental work, adjusting after each failed attempt to connect to something that wasn't there yet.
The construction itself was rough. Entity-class path-energy packed into the substrate at the six positions, accumulated over sixty years of pushing without a channel. Not crystallised into carrier grammar. More like an intention than a structure—the entity had marked the positions and held them, but the material it had used was wrong for chain infrastructure in the same way a foundation built from loose stone would need to be cleared before clean construction could begin.
