He carried it the way he always carried it — present without being the center of every thought, the specific management of someone who had learned that weight didn't get lighter but you could distribute it differently.
Kazuma was alert.
He'd been alert since leaving Vaelshara's ambient field boundary — not alarmed, the heightened attention of someone who had been reading the same environment for sixteen months and was now reading something new. The forest's ambient magical quality was different from the settlement's. Where Vaelshara had the dense specific weight of over a thousand named beings accumulated across eight years, the northern forest had the older, slower quality of things that had been alive and continuous for much longer.
The ambient temporal awareness was reading it carefully.
Satou could feel the sweep cycling faster than usual.
New data, the sweep said, in the language that wasn't language. Processing.
"There's a lot to read," Satou said.
Kazuma looked at him.
