LEVEL 0 IMMORTAL

The threshold of peak Fury Forge did not announce itself the way Elias had thought it would.

There was no flash or loud chime in his Lumina Space; he just felt a quiet redistribution of the forces inside him, as if a part of himself had finally reached maturity.

The System opened a single line of text at the edge of his vision.

Peak Fury Forge attained. Unallocated attribute points: 450.

Elias had been tracking the points like a man tracking the tally of debts he was choosing not to settle, and he had known that the climb from Level 0 to Level 9 would reward him more than the previous rises had.

Four hundred and fifty was the kind of stockpile that other Siphons assembled across decades of small victories, and he could spend them now.

If he wanted, he could push his Strength past 600 in a single allocation, or his Will past the threshold where some of the System's hidden traits would unlock. He could empty the reserve into Esoteric and find out, finally, what his Elder Talent did when properly fed. He could solve any single problem he might face in the next hour by simply choosing to be larger than the problem.

However, Elias did not do this, for him, the points were a held breath, and a held breath was a useful thing to have when a man did not yet know what he would need to scream.

Whatever waited at the bottom of this pit, he would meet it first with what he had built, not with what the System could pour into him on demand. If he survived the meeting unscathed, the points would still be his. If he died with them unallocated, the points would not have saved him anyway.

The reserve closed back into a quiet glow at the edge of his vision and he kept descending.

Ⓔ

Not surprisingly, it was Theron who saw it first, since he was three outcrops below Elias, and his hand stopped reaching for the next hold; his whole body went still.

"Stop," he said.

The line froze, and nobody spoke. In the silence, it was almost possible to hear the wall continuing to breathe under their palms, slow and patient and enormous.

The faint red glow from below, which had been the only constant of the descent for the last quarter of an hour, was no longer faint; it was now much brighter, the color of old blood, and it was everywhere.

"The wall is gone," Theron said.

Elias looked and saw that six feet beneath Theron's outcrop, the throat of the pit ended.

Below them was a void, and the space below them was lit by the red glow, and by other glows that Elias could not yet identify, dim and uneven and alive, but it was a vastness, and the vastness was filled.

Elias frowned, straining his sight to see what was below, but he knew it was filled with life, even though the feeling this life gave him was one of cold.

It seemed they had finally reached their destination.

Elias moved past Theron without a word and took the next outcrop, and the next, and on the third one he stopped.

In this position, he could see more clearly, and he allowed himself a long moment to understand what he was looking at, because what he was looking at was not the kind of thing that could be understood at speed.

The pit had suddenly curved, it bent inward and then opened into the ceiling of an enormous chamber, and the chamber resembled a temple. Elias had been inside temples before, and he had read about more.

He saw that the shape of this one was old, possessing the kind of architecture that had stopped being made for a long time.

Columns the size of grain silos rose at intervals of fifty feet, their surfaces carved with reliefs in a script that Elias could not recognize, but there were certain figures depicted between the runes who wore wings and crowns and stood with their hands raised toward the ceiling as if greeting whoever might descend from above.

If not for his trial in the Fragment of Divinity, he would have been surprised that such a structure was underneath the earth and buried so deeply.

However, Elias could only see fragments of it. Most of the temple was buried in bodies.

The floor of the temple, which he estimated to be perhaps a quarter of a mile across, had been swallowed entirely by the spawns. They lay piled against the columns, draped over the lips of fallen carvings, layered in fields of pale flesh that rose and fell in waves to a depth he could not estimate from this height.

Some were moving, most were still. There were not hundreds of thousands of them…. There were millions.

He had been killing a lot of these creatures at the surface, and he had been proud of the count, and now he understood how laughable that count truly was.

The count he had been racking up was a tithe. The reservoir was here. Every creature he had cut down above had been a finger, and the body had been below all along.

In his mind, he did the arithmetic and revised the framework, accepting the new scale.

Elias did not know much, but he knew that whatever had built this place had been preparing for a war.

The others arrived behind him, and Elias heard their boots find his outcrop's neighbors, heard the small intakes of breath, and the sound of Sera swearing under her breath.

Tarian said nothing at all, which Elias found a bit disturbing as the prince had been overly affectionate and friendly these last few moments, and Elias knew pretense when he saw it, even if the pretense was particularly clever.

He frowned a bit when he heard Elara begin to weep, very quietly, but Elias did not look at her but at the center of the temple, where a gigantic creature the size of a mountain resided.