A continuous pathway that traverses all of the soil cities, including circumnavigating the gap between the central and southern islands. It’s not always the most efficient route to take between locations, but because it’s the only one formally maintained by the cities it tends to be both easier and more comfortable to navigate than ancillary pathways.
It is paved with a wide grid of square bricks perforated by holes in the shape of radicals, arranged in such a way that information can be parsed from the surface itself. What information the road contains varies along its length; some is contextually relevant (e.g., distance markers), but much of it documents preserved knowledge and literature from early in the settlement of the archipelago. The stretches of road that see the heaviest use tend to be garbled and fragmented due to repairs and modifications; combined with the use of archaic radicals to encode the original information, the exact content can be difficult to parse and is a subject of much scholarship.
Despite being somewhat a relic of the past, the long road is regarded with pride and affection as a representation of solidarity between the soil cities, and that knowledge should be freely accessible to those who seek it. It still sees its fair share of travelers, including scholar pilgrims who set out to “read the long road” from end to end.