The tunnel's mouth opened into a chamber that made Parker's eyes water from trying to process what he was seeing. The space curved impossibly, walls bending through dimensions that his mind kept rejecting as wrong. It was vast—larger than any cathedral, yet somehow intimate, as though the entire universe had been compressed into a single room.
At the center, suspended in a web of living crystal, hung the Prime Core of New York.
Parker's breath caught. The Core was the size of a basketball, its surface a constantly shifting aurora of colors that didn't exist in normal light. But within its depths, he could see movement—streams of golden energy spiraling through its heart, each thread carrying the dreams of souls who had ever walked New York's streets across infinite realities.
It pulsed with a rhythm deeper than heartbeat, each throb sending ripples through the crystalline web that held it.
