CHAPTER VI - The First Towers of NEX

From orbit, the Earth no longer appeared abandoned.

The planet remained scarred beneath layers of atmospheric ash and fractured weather systems, its oceans darkened, its continents broken by the wounds of the collapse, yet across the northern hemisphere an immense field of light now stretched through the permanent twilight like the visible nervous system of a world rebuilding itself from below. The expanding infrastructure of NEX radiated across the surface in luminous geometric patterns vast enough to be mistaken for continental circuitry rather than architecture.

And at the center of it all, the first true towers began to rise.

Not as buildings.

As vertical organisms of adaptive intelligence.