Chapter 334: Foundation
The plains took three days to cross.
After the broken ground of Zone Nine, the flat land felt almost wrong. Open, even, nothing rising in any direction. Kai walked it and read the stone under his feet the way he always did. For two of the three days there was nothing to read but old, deep, patient rock.
Then on the third afternoon the Ambient Map showed him a blank.
Not an absence. The nine chained zones behind him hummed their slow steady chord, each one a known point on the network. Ahead of him, where Zone Ten should be, there was nothing. No signal. No draw pattern. Just stone the network had not reached yet.
He stopped at the edge of it and let the team catch up.
"Here," he said.
Soren looked at the flat ground, then at his instruments, then at the flat ground again. "There is nothing here."
