Chapter 281: Arrival
The eighth node was different before they reached it.
Kai felt it through the carrier function four hours before they arrived — a change in the organized rock that the seven nodes before hadn't shown. Not stronger. Not denser the way the interior nodes had been dense. More purposeful. As if everything in the entity's field had been arranged to point toward this one place.
He didn't file it anywhere. He kept walking.
The distributed entity's field stretched for a hundred kilometers across the eastern highland. Seven days they had walked through it, guided from one concentration node to the next by the entity itself. Each node had been a lesson. Directional pressure at the first. Layered rock architecture at the second. Chain-formation patterns at the third. By the seventh node, Kai's carrier function read the field's organized structure the way he read ordinary rock. Not perfectly. But without having to stop and work out every line.
