Xu Ling led him for two cycles before she stopped.
He used the walking time the way he had learned to use movement through the Middle Domain, the Observer's readings accumulating into the background map of the realm that grew incrementally more detailed with each new stretch of ground covered. The direction she was taking him was one he had not traveled before, moving away from the chamber's coordinates and the seven columns and the proving ground's door in a direction that the Observer's density reading registered as genuinely new territory, content he had not seen signatures of in any previous scan.
When she stopped, it was at the edge of something the Observer registered first as a boundary and then, as his reading developed, as a threshold.
