Nārada does not drop in on Dvārakā. He goes to see whether a report is true, moves through the palaces one at a time, and comes out with a finding.
See He Did Not Come to Visit. He Came to Check.
[RESONANCE] Because verification is supposed to be the thing devotion does not do.
⚠ And this volume runs checks constantly. Not as doubt, not as a crisis of faith — as procedure. Somebody hears a claim, goes to the site, inspects, and reports.
⚑ Collect them and it is a habit, not a scene.
Nārada tours the palaces to test a report. Parīkṣit halts the narration over a chronology gap and again over a version he already holds — "That is what we have heard" — and demands the discrepancy be explained. The narrator interrupts his own verse to say the sages who produced it are inconsistent. Kṛṣṇa asks a question he already knows the answer to so that the answer goes on the record in front of witnesses. A brahmana is made to state his own case aloud before it is granted.
⚑ [n≥3 PATTERN] — this volume's listeners are auditors rather than pupils, and its protagonists produce evidence rather than assert.
⚠ And the sharpest instance is the one that cuts the other way. Six arithmetic failures in twelve chapters, every one checkable against material on the same page, and not a single character checks any of them.
⚑ So the verification habit is selective, and the selection is legible: it audits claims about people and never claims about quantities.
Against The Book Recites Its Own Table of Contents and It Is On a List It Compiled — a text that stages verification in its narrative and then makes every claim about itself unverifiable. ⚑ It ranks itself, prices itself, and indexes itself, and nobody in the book audits any of it.
Promotion criterion: ⚑ the claims-about-people / claims-about-quantities split needs a counter-instance search. ⚠ One character checking one number anywhere in Vols 1–3 kills the split.
Search Vols 1–2 for any scene where a figure disputes a number rather than an account. ⚑ If none exists across three volumes, the split is worth stating at strength.