The base approach was a stone path.
Wide enough for four people walking abreast, the surface worn smooth by the passage of cultivators across three hundred years of attempts, the stone carrying the specific quality of something that had absorbed the spiritual energy of everyone who had ever walked it. He could feel that accumulation beneath his feet with each step, not as pressure but as history, the layered residue of ambition and preparation and hope and all the things people carried to this place.
The mountain was fully visible from the base approach in a way it had not been from inside the forest. Nine tiers ascending through layers of stone and light, each tier larger than the last from the base, the proportions inverted from standard mountain logic, the peak wider than the base's middle sections in the way that things are wider when they are not following physical law but a different organizing principle entirely.
