Chapter 325: The Ceiling
Zone Six was a day's travel northeast.
The terrain rose. The open plains gave way to old ridge country — folded stone pushed up by a fault shift that had happened long enough ago that the ridge's edges had worn smooth. The stone was gray-white, surface-adjacent, the kind of rock that sat just below the grass rather than thirty meters under it.
The wind moved through the ridge grass without pause.
Kai felt the zone before they reached the boundary.
Not through the carrier function — through his feet. The Earth Depth Sense read the developing entity through ground contact, the way it read everything in the eastern territory now. This entity was close. Not the weight of Zone Five's concentrated depth, not the wide spread of Zone Four's mudflat. Something almost at the surface. Twelve meters at most. The gene architecture was lighter than any zone he had worked — not weak. Light. A different quality entirely.
He noted this and said nothing.
