Chapter 261 – Deep Water
Eastern gap two sat under a sea.
Not a coastal margin or a shallow basin—an inland sea that had occupied the same geological depression since before the eastern ancient network was built. The ancient stages on the seabed's substrate had been laid down when the sea floor was dry, then submerged as the sea formed, and had been under constant water pressure ever since. The cleared corridor in the staging ran under thirty metres of water and several more metres of compressed seabed sediment.
He read it from the sea's eastern shore through Dragon Mode and Source Point integration. The ancient network on both sides of the corridor was intact and dense, the eastern primary's characteristic deep staging running at the depth of the seabed's formation. The corridor itself: the same deliberate clearance pattern, but compressed by water loading in a way no land corridor had been. The substrate in the gap was heavier. More resistant.
