He entered zone fifteen alone on the first morning.
Not the boundary section. The full interior. He had the permit. He had the B-zone endorsement from the challenge filing. He had been reading the zone's ambient field through the boundary for two weeks and understood its surface character well enough to move in it without spending the first hour just adapting.
He adapted in seven seconds.
Zone fifteen felt different from zone fourteen the way zone fourteen had felt different from zone nine. Not just denser—structured differently. The ambient path-energy here had been shaped by generations of B-zone creature populations, each generation refining the zone's energy profile by living in it, hunting in it, dying in it. The residue of that accumulated refinement was in the air, in the soil, in the path-layer that Extended Hunter's Instinct read continuously.
