The mountains of the North-West rose like the jagged teeth of a buried giant. Here, the air was thin, tasting of ozone and ancient dust. For three days, Fang Yi had traveled away from the Grand Canal, guided not by a map, but by the "static."
To his awakened senses, the world was no longer just a landscape of rock and pine. It was a flickering tapestry of data. He could feel the regions where the "System" was dense—monitored cities where every footstep was a calculated coordinate—and regions like these mountains, where the "program" ran thin, leaving gaps of raw, unformatted reality.
He was looking for a "Dead Zone."
In the logic of the cosmic supercomputer, a Dead Zone was an error in the rendering. A place where the laws of physics were slightly "loose," ignored by the central process
