He read the builders' document in the morning.
All of it this time. The third paragraph—the one he had read twice the night before and then set aside because understanding it required sitting with it rather than processing it quickly—came clear in the morning light.
Zone twenty was not a zone. The builders had named it that because they had no other vocabulary in the system they were building. What they had found beyond zone nineteen's outer boundary was not a space shaped by creature development and Rift ambient. It had no path-layer in the sense the Guild's classification system used. It had no creatures. It had no ambient to measure or classify.
