Zone twenty had no transition corridor.
He walked past zone nineteen's outer boundary marker at the seventh hour and zone twenty was simply there. No path-layer shift registered. No adaptation event fired. No ambient pressure change marked the crossing. The sovereign seed knew the difference—a change in what the road connection was pointing at, the same quality as crossing a threshold in a building where the floor is continuous but the room changes. One step in zone nineteen. The next step somewhere else.
He stopped and read what he was standing in.
Dragon Mode had no ambient to process.
Zone nineteen's path-layer ended at the boundary marker—not thinning, not fading, ending. Zone twenty contained no path-layer in the sense Dragon Mode was built to read. For the first time since the system had integrated into continuous state, the ambient read came back empty. Not zero. Empty. The difference between an instrument reading silence and an instrument with nothing to read.
