Inner region.
The words settled in his chest with the specific, cold quality of information that the body processes before the mind has finished receiving it — the chill arriving immediately, ahead of the analysis, as if some part of his awareness had been waiting for exactly this confirmation and had already prepared its response.
He knew enough....
Not everything — his knowledge of the Iron Tree Forest's geography had the specific, practical gaps of someone who had entered it as a calculated risk rather than a studied expedition — but enough to know what the words inner region meant when placed beside everything else the afternoon had already produced. Legendary grade creatures were not anomalies in the inner region. They were the baseline. The creatures that the outer layer's star beast population existed in relation to, the upper end of the hierarchy that everything further in was sorted below.
