He came out of the deep zone's eastern boundary as the afternoon light was moving toward its cooler register, Tianyuan Star's sun at the angle that corresponded to the late hours before evening, the forest at the boundary line casting longer shadows than it had been casting when he entered.
The Zhao Family estate was forty minutes at a walking pace from the eastern path's entry point. He walked it without using any movement technique. Not from exhaustion. From the specific choice to let the ground cover itself at the speed it covered itself when you did not accelerate it, the transition from the mountain's deep zone back to the estate's cultivated order serving as a natural interval between what the deep zone had been and what the next step was.
