Half a day south of his previous route.
The terrain was unremarkable—highland scrubland, old forest, the substrate below running at the eastern hemisphere's characteristic compressed depth. Nothing on the surface to mark the Rift's location except the quality he had learned to read years ago: the specific ambient that path-energy produced when an entity below was managing a concentration of deep pressure.
He had been reading zone ambient since his first week in Kael's Seat. He knew what it felt like.
This was fainter than any managed zone he'd worked in—not because the entity was weak, but because there was no road network architecture directing its output toward the surface in the channelled way that the managed Rifts' chains provided. The entity's work was going in every direction rather than being directed upward through Stage architecture.
Inefficient. Not dangerous. Just uncollimated.
He ran Dragon Mode at full depth and read the entity directly.
