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...and I'm not sure displaying newly formed words offsets the futility of having a beautiful linking device for the entire theme/puzzle sacrificed at the death.

CD - I agree with your general point. Any confusion I think arises from the first sentence - you can't leave something empty when it isn't empty. The rest of the directions are so beautifully worded to cover both eventualities that this first sentence seems slightly out of place - unless there is a meaning of "leave" that I'm unaware of. Something like "The unclued entry should be empty initially" works in both cases - and if I can think of that I'm sure Artix would have done too. Which is why I still wonder if there's a subtlety in the wording that I (and perhaps some others) have missed.

Preambles must always be 100% foolproof... if not, this happens.

Hi gitto, I'm with loge (a couple of posts after you). "Leave" can only apply once.

It doesn't matter how many times you fill it, it is ALWAYS unclued - and that is what the first sentence specifically states,

Loge, it states "leave the unclued entry empty initially" and the title says "follow the directions again". So you are not leaving something empty, you are merely obeying everything.

A similar debate over 'leave' was had a long time ago on a Sabre puzzle - 'leave it low' (I think) - it was a lowercase letter of the cyrillic alphabet clued by an uppercase abbreviation.

Gitto, I'll buy that the "initially" in the first sentence could mean that you ignore it the second time round, but then the reference to empty space doesn't hold true. But the general requirement is, I think, clear enough, even if the wording of the preamble isn't as perfect as it could be.

I'm lost here. First or second time around there is still an unclued entry. If you leave it empty, first or second time around, each grid has an "empty space". My conundrum is that the first answer relates to all of the 22 highlighted cells but the second answer doesn't, but you can't leave the first answer without compromising the full second set of directions - so I'm leaving the second answer in the grid - but I may regret that in a couple of weeks time!!

Drxx, that was the controversial KOHb puzzle from 2012. I wasn't up to completing Sabre puzzles back then but I remember the instruction was KEEP IT DOWN! to convert B to b, the soft sign in the Russian alphabet. Funny how these things stick in the mind!