They left through a seam.
The village simply ended. The paved structure gave way to ribbed earth and thick, tangled growth. Daniel felt the guidance pressure in his mind thin out, then vanish.
Behind him, someone exhaled—a sharp, nervous sound.
"Okay," a girl said. "I liked the part where the plants weren't trying to eat us."
Daniel didn't turn, but he recognized the tone. Dry humor masking a lot of fear.
"Give it a minute," said a dwarven boy ahead of them. "The land's still deciding if it likes us."
The girl snorted. "Great. Evaluated by dirt."
Daniel smiled despite himself.
The first band of managed wild parted for them. It was subtle—grass flattening just before a boot landed, shrubs leaning back a few inches.
Insects diverted around them in a magnetic hum.
"See?" The girl pointed. "Manners. I can work with manners."
"Name?" the dwarf asked, slowing to walk beside her.
"Rhea."
"Bram. And don't trust the manners. They stop about fifty meters ahead."
"Daniel," Daniel added, filing the names away.
The elf girl drifted closer on his other side. Her eyes were unfocused, tracking something on her internal display. "Angle left," she said softly.
Bram frowned. "Ground load's stable here."
"Not the ground," she replied. "The canopy."
Daniel checked his overlay. The probabilities were flickering, blooming without committing to a forecast. He looked at the elf. "You see something changing," he said.
She blinked, surprised, then gave a sharp, pleased smile. "Yes. Thank you."
"Name?" Rhea asked.
"Sil. And it's shedding patience, not skin."
Rhea made a face. "That's worse."
They reached the second tier, and Bram was right—the manners stopped.
The ground darkened. Roots pulsed like thick cables braided through the soil. Fungal columns rose in clusters, their caps wide and translucent, with pale light crawling beneath the surfaces.
Bram stopped.
Daniel stopped with him.
Rhea took one more step before her overlay flagged the terrain. She swore and rocked back on her heels. "Okay," she whispered. "On our own now."
Sil inhaled, slow and deliberate. The forest lit up for her, gradients rippling outward in her vision. "Something's inside the caps," she said. "Big."
Daniel's numbers refused to settle. Not danger, not safety. Just missing data.
Then the ground bulged.
The nearest fungal column split open.
The thing that emerged was a mess of biology that should have stayed buried. It was segmented and pale, looking like it had been extruded directly from the fungus. It was at least three meters long, but it didn't slither like a snake. It drove root-like appendages into the soil, anchored them, and hauled itself forward with a sickening, jerking motion.
There was no head, just a blunt, fleshy stump that flexed open and shut, tasting the air.
Bram made a small, unhappy sound. Sil went still.
The creature reached the edge of the fungal cluster and coiled tight. The air smelled suddenly sharp—loam and rot. A seam split open on the creature's front, revealing a ring of trembling sensory filaments. They waved blindly for a second, mapping the air, then snapped toward the group.
Daniel's overlay spiked: Heat signature. Ionization.
"Is it… looking at us?" Bram whispered.
"It knows exactly where we are," Sil said.
The segmented body uncoiled, the root-legs digging in. It wasn't moving to escape. It was digging in to defend the forest.
"That is absolutely not a deer," Rhea whispered.
"Maintenance class 'flora'," Bram said.
The creature's sensory clusters flared bright.
Someone bolted—a boy Daniel hadn't met yet. He panicked, turning to run, but he hit the root-web wrong. He tripped hard and slid across the soil.
The creature lunged.
Sil moved first, cutting sideways, vines parting for her hands. Bram shouted, and the ground beneath the creature's anchors hardened, turning to stone. The creature's roots scrabbled, losing their grip.
Daniel moved last, but he moved with purpose.
He reached the fallen boy just as the soil softened again. The boy was scrambling backward, hyperventilating. Daniel didn't grab him. He planted one knee, lowered his center of gravity, and offered his forearm.
The boy locked onto it.
Contact triggered something. The creature froze.
Daniel's overlay went blank. No numbers. Just the heavy, shaking weight of the boy on his arm.
Bram's intervention held. The creature recoiled, its anchors tearing out of the hardened earth. Sil slammed her palm into a glowing vine, sending a surge of light through the network.
The creature retreated, folding back into the fungal column as the cap sealed shut.
Silence.
The boy sobbed once, then clamped his mouth shut.
Daniel kept his forearm steady until the shaking stopped. Then he hauled the boy up.
"Breathe," Daniel said. "You're up. That means you won."
The boy stared at him, confused.
"He's right," Rhea said, crouching nearby. "Upright is a good metric."
Daniel released the boy and stood. His own knees were trembling, but he kept his face neutral.
Sil was studying him. "You waited."
Daniel shrugged. "It was being handled."
"That's not why."
He met her gaze. She wasn't accusing him; she was cataloging him.
"Sometimes," Daniel said, "jumping in early just gets in the way."
They encountered the transit spine the next morning.
They felt it before they saw it—a low-frequency thrum in the ground, steady as a heartbeat, vibrating up through their boot soles.
The managed wild thinned out. The trees stepped back in an orderly retreat, revealing a clearing that stretched upward into the haze.
Cables.
They rose from the ground at steep angles, anchoring the landscape to the sky. There were dozens of them, thick bundles of carbon-composite and braided alloy, spaced with mathematical precision. They didn't sway. They didn't hum. They just held tension, millions of tons of it.
A pod launched.
It shot out of a recessed cradle at the base of the nearest cable. No roar, just a sudden, violent displacement of air and the sharp crack of magnetic acceleration. It climbed the line fast, shrinking to a bright bead in seconds.
Rhea shielded her eyes. "That's fast. Too fast for comfort."
"It's crossing the diameter," Bram said, watching the pod vanish into the atmospheric haze near the cylinder's axis. "Connecting the cities on the far arc."
"Whatever is inside that just pulled five Gs," Daniel noted. His overlay tagged the acceleration curve automatically: High-G Transit. Cargo priority.
Rhea looked at him. "You sound like you've ridden one."
"Maybe I have," Daniel said. The memory was there, but faint—not an image, just the somatic recollection of weight pressing him into a gel-seat.
Below the cables, the ground opened up. Sections of earth gave way to transparent structural layers, revealing the underground tiers they had been walking over. It was a city turned inside out—transit halls glowing with amber light, cargo rails shifting containers, people moving through the arteries of the habitat's hull.
"They live under this," Sil murmured, looking down through the glass.
"It's a roof," Daniel said. He crouched, brushing dirt off a section of the transparency. "We're walking on the roof of the industrial sector."
"Why put us up here?" Rhea asked. "If the real work is down there?"
"Calibration," Daniel said. He stood up, wiping his hands. "They could have dropped us anywhere. They put us on the slow path so we'd feel the scale of the place. You don't respect a machine until you know how big it is."
Bram nodded, seemingly approving of the logic. "Simulations cheat distance. Walking doesn't."
They followed the cable line for hours. The hum became background noise, a constant reminder of the energy moving through the spine of the world.
Eventually, the path rose, and the canopy broke.
The Sentinel Tree.
It didn't look like a tree so much as a vertical ecosystem. The trunk was wider than a city block, its bark ridges deep enough to house walkways and dwellings. Branches radiated outward in tiers, supporting platforms woven directly into the living wood. It was a hub, a biological anchor point for the sector.
Daniel felt the seed in his pocket warm up. A haptic ping. Proximity alert. It was reacting to the network.
The path forked here. One branch led down into the settlement at the tree's base. The other continued along the ridge.
The group slowed.
This was the separation point. Daniel saw the families waiting near the tree's roots—groups of adults watching the path. Humans, dwarves, elves. They weren't cheering. They were waiting to see who would choose them.
Rhea stopped. She adjusted her pack, looking toward the tree.
"You going?" Daniel asked.
"I think so," she said. She pointed to a group of humans near a lower platform—mechanics, judging by the grease stains and the tool rigs. "They look like they fix things. I like fixing things."
"Good luck," Daniel said.
She hesitated, then stepped in and hugged him—quick, fierce, and practical. "Don't get weird on me, Daniel. Stay loud."
"I'll try."
She jogged down the slope toward the mechanics. Daniel watched her go. He felt a pang of something—not loss, exactly, but the recognition of a chapter closing.
Bram grunted. "Too much wood for me. I need stone." He jerked his chin toward a transit station further down the line. "See you in the deeps, Daniel."
"See you, Bram."
Sil didn't say goodbye. She just looked at Daniel, her eyes scanning him with that unsettling Elven focus.
"You're keeping the seed," she said.
"For now."
"Good. It's not ready to be planted yet." She turned and vanished into the foliage, moving silently toward the upper tiers of the tree.
Daniel stood alone on the ridge.
The silence returned, but it was different now. It was the silence of solitude.
He started walking again. The path narrowed, leading away from the settlement and back into the wilder bands of the cylinder.
He checked his internal clock. The sun-strip wouldn't dim for another four hours. He had time.
As he walked, he didn't feel the old perspective "taking over." It was subtler than that.
He kept walking.
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It had texture now. Room for thought without demanding it.
Sometimes, when things went wrong—or almost did—Daniel noticed how his body reacted before his mind caught up. The pause. The refusal to rush. The way fear arrived late, if at all. It didn't feel like bravery. It felt like familiarity.
Like he'd been here before.
Not this place. This moment.
The specifics never came back when he tried to reach for them. No faces. No names. Just the sense that some part of him had already learned which mistakes were expensive and which ones only felt that way.
Whatever had lived before him wasn't loud anymore. It didn't argue. It didn't push. It just leaned, gently, toward certain choices and away from others.
Daniel let it.
The seed in his pocket cooled as the sentinel tree fell farther behind. The path ahead didn't announce itself. It didn't need to.
A soft prompt blinked at the edge of his vision.
Route: undefined.
Daniel smiled and didn't answer it right away.
He adjusted the strap of his pack and walked on, letting the world tell him where he was by how it responded when he moved through it.
That felt close enough to an introduction.