The terrain shifted on the sixth day.
The highland rock that had defined the landscape east of Kael's Seat—the same stone that formed the plateau where the convergence point sat, the same geology that the ancient stage below the camp had been integrated into—gave way to something older. Pre-compression bedrock: stone that had been in place for long enough that its internal structure had changed, the geological pressure of accumulated time having compressed it into a density that Dragon Mode read as different in kind from anything in the five-chain zone systems. Deeper signal. Harder substrate. The ancient network's grammar at this depth was not carved into the rock. It was part of the rock.
