Chapter 278: Fork in the Road
It didn’t take long before Coop was presented with another fork in the road. Despite the compelling advice granted by Neon Park’s leadership, he ended up having to make his own decisions soon enough.
“Figures.” He mumbled to himself. No matter how much he desired to embrace the mindless grinds, he sometimes had to use his brain.
The Underlayer blurred time and distance more than the manipulations of mana already had, but he was still confident in his own actions. Despite feeling like he made no progress at all, his mistjumps had carried him a few hundred miles away from the tamed territory of Neon Park and its subordinates. If he had to assign a specific number he would have said he passed over 350 miles of smooth dirt plains. How many miles that translated to on the surface was unknown, but depending on the exact direction he was actually traveling, he imagined he was anywhere from Northern Ontario, to Quebec, or Newfoundland.
Other than the rare column acting as a landmark, he hadn’t encountered anything of note. He knew enough about Canada to recognize how sparsely populated it grew in its north, so not finding any control points representing settlements on the surface was relatively unsurprising.
There, approximately 350 miles beyond Neon Park’s territory, the tunnel of the Underlayer presented him with a choice. Continue in what he assumed was north-ish, or veer left in what he imagined was a more westward direction?
As far as he could tell, the Underlayer had consisted of completely linear, but extraordinarily wide tunnels. He found it unlikely that it was actually perfectly straight, but the deviations from Ghost Reef up the east coast of North America had been so subtle he wouldn’t have been able to identify them if they were there at all. Somehow, it felt like the tunnel had traveled in an entirely straight line from Ghost Reef to Neon Park and beyond. It encompassed locations as far apart as Boston and West Virginia without any obvious turns, stretching wide enough to mask its walls behind a veil of clear pure mana that thickened the air when he peered into the distance.
Coop would never be able to tell if the path shifted as he was only a tiny speck within its massive framework. To make matters worse, for all he knew, the tunnels could also be fluctuating up and down at small angles, or growing wider in certain sections. The dirt plains offered no real clues on elevation changes either. He shuddered at the idea of the tunnels actually including sharp turns and steep inclines, like a massive roller coaster, while mana played with his senses, making it all seem straight and flat. Luckily, he had already encountered enough connections to the surface to be relatively sure such extreme changes were unlikely.
His efforts to compare the underground layer to the surface probably weren’t helping himself draw a picture anyway. The surface of the Earth had been drastically changed at the start of the assimilation, probably as a result of the formation of the Underlayer in the first place. He might as well have been exploring a completely new planet that merely imitated Earth’s geography. If he fingerpainted the globe from memory it would be more likely to be accurate than a precise replica of the surface as they knew it before mana activated.
Coop shook his head at the thought. It wasn’t like they could do anything about that. He’d have to rely on his more cartographic minded companions to make sense of everything in the long run.
The path in the Underlayer was wide enough that he had been forced to drift hundreds of miles east or west in order to investigate possible landmarks in the distance, further throwing off his own grasp of direction. While he was confident he hadn’t missed anything, the distances still revealed the full extent of the underground.
Objectives had appeared beneath settlements all across the underground, falling on either edge of the tunnel he happened to occupy. Did settlements always have the Underlayer directly below? It sure seemed like it, but did that mean the entire planet contained a hollow layer, and the walls of the Underlayer abutted more tunnels in order to account for the small amount of mobility of the civilization shards? If that was the case, the massive pillars must have been doing a lot of work, structurally, to maintain the globe.
The one fork in the road north of Neptune’s Bridge had been the main exception to the linear path he followed from Ghost Reef. He could add the one onramp that Neon Park was planning on traveling, assuming it took them across the continent as a second known extension of the highway.