Chapter 115: Below the Hatch
Jim and Coll stopped at the dark stain on the ground outside the outpost entrance. It had dried into the pale soil in a wide radius, the color deeper than the surrounding wasteland, almost violet where it had pooled thickest. Jim crouched slightly and studied it with his glasses adjusted forward. "What happened here?" He asked, already bringing a pinch of the dirt closer to smell it.
"A Corruptor." I said, evenly. "It was being kept inside this building."
Jim immediately dropped the dirt.
He straightened without another word, but the quality of his silence suggested he had just updated his internal rules for terrain sampling to ask first, touch later.
Coll watched him brush his hand off on his pants. "You were going to taste it next, weren’t you?"
"I was not." Jim said, firmly.
We then went inside, the group spread through the outpost. Coll checked the structure. Finn assessed the silver in the walls. Kira was outside checking on the massive vine she’d built there. Wip was with her, sitting in her head.
"There is still some canned food." I said, recalling it from the last visit. "Finn found it behind a wall."
Jim and Coll both turned.
"Canned food." Coll said, like he was confirming he had heard correctly. "In here."
"Yes." I said, simply.
"How old is this building?" Jim asked, adjusting his glasses with precise concern.
"Older than us." I said, without hesitation. "By a significant amount."
"And you ate it?" Jim asked, his expression caught somewhere between professional curiosity and alarm.
"It tasted excellent." I said, with mild confidence. "Coco can confirm."
Coco, who had already located the hidden shelf, was examining the cans with the focused joy of someone reunited with something beloved, he turned and nodded once. "Very good." He said.
Jim looked at the can Coco was holding for a long moment, the expression of a man at war with his own standards settling in.
Then he decided to take one.
Coll was already carrying three.
"No label." Finn said, appearing beside them with a can of his own. He turned it over in his hands. "Just a small symbol that looks like a bird being extremely optimistic about a mountain."
Phinyx gave it a brief look. "I would also be extremely optimistic if Corruptors couldn’t reach me." He said.
I left them to it and walked toward the bunker room, following the path I remembered. The corridor felt familiar, the walls shone thanks to the white rocks around the place.
The room was as I had left it.
A small hole on the big silver wall, through it you could see a friendly skeleton. Eric was still there. The lab coat somehow still white. You’d think after all this time the coat would at least have the decency to turn yellow.
The runic table sat in the center, the ward was still resting at the top. Below it, when I crouched and looked at the base, was the hatch. A flat panel with a recessed handle, easy to miss if you were not looking for it.
I pulled open the hatch, the darkness below was complete. I went down.
The ladder was made of silver, it felt cold under my palms, the steps spaced for someone tall. I counted steps and lost count somewhere past thirty. The descent was long enough that the sounds from above faded into nothing.
Then as my feet reached the ground, the lights came on.
Not all at once, they followed a sequence from somewhere near the top, white points appearing in small glass-like containers set into the walls at regular intervals. The rock inside each one glowed with a flat brightness, nothing warm about it, entirely functional.
The room they illuminated was large.
The two cones were exactly as Eric’s notes had described. One descended from the ceiling, the golden material catching the white light and returning it in a way that made the structure seem almost alive. A second, smaller cone rose from the floor to meet it, the gap between their tips about an arm’s length. Two levers stood at the base, one significantly larger than the other.
The larger lever connected to the whole assembly. The smaller one attached only to the lower cone.
I started with the smaller one.
It moved with resistance at first, then released into a smooth arc, and the lower cone shifted sideways on its own, driven by some internal mechanism that had been waiting for exactly this input. It revealed a structure beneath, a central pillar of the same golden material running straight down through the floor, and around it a spiral staircase descending into darkness the white lights had not reached.
Small red lights activated along the path of the stairs as the cone moved clear, appearing one after another like the structure was acknowledging my presence and lighting the way.
I stood at the top of the spiral and looked down.
The red lights went a long way.
Just how far does this go?
I went down anyway.
Ten minutes of descent, give or take, the kind of walking that gives you time to wonder if everyone above had started worrying about me yet.
They are definitely having a conversation about whether I fell, I thought. Finn is already designing my tombstone. It will have a happy bird flying toward a mountain.
The stairs ended in an open space.
The ceiling was rock and dirt, supported by something that was neither silver nor the golden material from above, something older, a dark grey substance with the density of compressed stone but smoother at the surface. The floor was silver threaded with gold spreading outward from the base of the pillar, running toward the walls in a pattern that looked almost organic.
I followed the threads to the wall.
Obsidian.
Two walls of it, stacked in dense layers, the black surface catching the red light and absorbing most of it. The other two walls had already broken down into black powder, the material seemed similar enough to suggest it was obsidian too, but it was not something I could confirm.
Voidstone.
I stood there for a moment, doing the math. If an entire system of cities ran with only four of these voidstone walls, and we had two, we had enough energy for this exile and for my cube to charge... probably.
I opened my inventory and selected the cube.
It arrived in my palm, the golden runes so dim they barely looked golden at all. The faint glow would likely work as an indicator of how charged it was.
I turned toward the intact wall and built a mental box around a dense section near the top. I took out the yo-yo and held it.
Switch.
A chunk of voidstone arrived in my hand, dark and dense, heavier than its size suggested.
I brought it close to the cube.
A notification appeared. The golden runes shifted, not glowing exactly, but moving, rearranging slightly in response.
[Would you like to consume the cleansed voidstone?]
[Yes / No]
I selected Yes.
The chunk began to fade, not crumbling, not breaking, dissolving from the outside inward into fine black dust that drifted to the floor until nothing remained.
The golden runes brightened slightly.
Not much, a fraction of what they looked like when I first got it.
I did it again.
And again...
The process became mechanical. Identify a section. Grab my yo-yo. Switch. Confirm. Watch it dissolve. Check the brightness. Repeat.
I am essentially mining with a toy, I thought. The ancient builders would be either horrified or impressed.
By the fourth transfer the runes were finally glowing steadily. By the sixth they matched what I remembered from the first time I had used the barrier properly.
I felt the cube could still take much more, but I stopped.
One wall had given about half its remaining mass. The second wall was untouched. The two reduced to dust could give nothing more.
This structure had been here since before the Sundering, keeping voidstone reserves stored in these walls for longer than anyone alive could account for, and I had just taken a significant portion of it in a single afternoon.
We would need what was left.
I put the cube back in my inventory and looked at the golden threads on the floor one more time.
Then I started walking back up the spiral stairs, the red lights tracking my ascent, already calculating how much work the last stretch would actually take.
The answer was going to depend entirely on what happened when I activated the upper mechanism and looked at the abandoned city ahead.
Because if the barriers there were still functional, if they could be reactivated from here.
There would be no reason to build a corridor at all.
