Book 6. Chapter 6: Treasures
Remember how I mentioned I wasn’t sure if Quath was genuinely a happy-go-lucky merchant or just smiling through a mask.
I got my hands on the map he was making, and now I’m nearly completely sure he’s the latter, because only a complete psychopath would fill the map up with this much detail.
“That is… uh, impressive.” I said, looking through the layered maps.
We’d arrived at a blast door, one embedded inside the cliffside wall. Past that would be the underpassage, and then they’d be spat out into the grand highway. A sort of mite biome that was less of a large sector and more of a thin branching root that wrapped around quite a good chunk of the world. This was why most cities lived within the first two stratas, the third strata didn’t have a highway like this anymore and got more alien as far as I’ve heard
Quath nodded at my earlier paise, “Green segments are those my convoy has personally crossed by and confirmed their authenticity. Pale green are my hunches and guesses on what the layout would likely look. Yellow are those where I am no longer as certain. Those are locations that are known to have some drift associated with them, and the maps I found that partitioned those sectors are beyond ten years out of date.”
“And the gray is just a complete guess?” I asked. The map he’d sent was this multicolored blob of hyper condensed details. To the point even Wrath took a few seconds to go through all the layers and absorb the information. She even mentioned finding the visual framework to be novel and would replicate that style in the future.
It looked like an anatomy picture of a dead body, with the veins in green and yellow, arteries filled with life that gradually tapered outwards into smaller passageways growing dimmer in color until it turned completely gray. Most of the surrounding map was all gray.
“The gray would be map partitions as written down that are beyond the main pathways. Mites often change those outskirt sections the most, and those sections none of my people nor myself have crossed by at all. Larger roads like these are generally safe from changes, so I feel reasonably comfortable mapping even sections I’ve never crossed as yellow.”
In giant red was a dot surrounded by a circle further up. That would be where the mite terminal existed. Not too far off, about a day’s jog.