The forest changed again.
The third clearing had marked a transition that he had felt but not fully identified while standing in it. Past that point, the old growth character of the deep zone shifted, the trees becoming less like trees and more like markers, the spacing between them no longer ecological but architectural, arranged in a pattern that served a purpose he could not identify from inside it.
He stopped and looked at the arrangement from the middle of a long straight path that had not been straight fifty meters behind him.
The path had straightened when he was not paying attention to it. That was specific information. The deep zone was actively shaping his route, not in the hostile way of an environment trying to trap something, but in the way of a test that was directing a subject toward the next assessment rather than leaving navigation to chance.
He kept walking.
