The river headwaters were two days south.
The terrain descended from the mountain range through old-growth forest into the basin where the river's source gathered from underground springs and seasonal snowmelt. No roads. No paths. The substrate here had been shaped by water over a very long time—the geological layer soft and porous where it was exposed to the constant moisture, the ancient network's stages running through it with the worn quality of something that had been intact when it was built and had been in contact with water ever since.
He ran Dragon Mode as they approached. The ancient stages in the water-carved substrate were functional at their cores—the internal grammar intact—but their contact surfaces were eroded. Not broken. Worn to imprecise tolerances at the edges where the substrate moisture had worked on them over millennia.
Different from everything he had built in before.
He found the fifth Source Point on the afternoon of the second day.
