The Third Step: Chapter Forty

Down and down I went. When I passed the thirteenth sealed story, I was accosted by a shade attempting to suck me dry of death mana, like some sort of strange mana vampire. It was powerful, too, well into fourth gate, and it had eaten all of the ghosts and shades on its floor. If not for the fact that each layer of Deepfall Cemetery worked as a seal and a downward channel of energy, it would likely have attempted to delve deeper, but the stairs were for energy, not mana. 

Fighting the vampiric death spirit while also not disturbing the bones of the dead was difficult, but unlike the fight upstairs, I wasn’t limited to only using my physical force. I restrained myself to using blademoss, however, as using Foxfyre down this low seemed dangerous, and anything else like Mantle Dragonfyre or the frozen pitcher plants might be destructive. It left me with many scrapes and bruises, and drained mana, but alive.

On the fifteenth floor, I encountered a revenant, an amalgam of shade, ghost, and skeleton all working in one body. It had originally been bound by a series of spells on its resting place, one of which felt like a Spirit Circle. I didn’t explicitly know the rest, but they were all for a similar purpose – containing the revenant. Perhaps once that had worked, but more than a decade without maintenance had caused the spells to decay, and the angry revenant attacked.  

Despite being a revenant, it was only third gate, with magic that reminded me of physical and temporal mana. It was able to move blindingly fast, and actually managed to get its hands around my throat the moment I entered the floor, but once I figured out what was happening, I was able to teleport away, then slowly charge up a circle of blue barrier milkcaps alongside a Spirit Circle spell of my own. It wasn’t quite as effective as the wards that had once been laid down, but it should contain the revenant for my journey, and might even help the next supplicant. 

At the eighteenth, the death energy was getting thick enough that it had actually compressed into something. A mana source, shaped like a human skull, but made of glowing purple crystal, radiated first gate death mana. The spirits on the floor were slowly, carefully, draining its mana into themselves. They had to be careful, as the mana source could only absorb ambient energy so quickly, and they didn’t want to deplete the supply. 

Feeling bad for the ghosts, I removed a pair of second gate mana sources from my stash and placed them on the ground where offerings to the dead usually went. None of them were set to rest by the action, but it made me feel better to know that I was making 

On the twenty-second, the air began to grow dangerously stale. It didn’t matter how enhanced my physique was, if I didn’t have enough fresh air in my lungs, I wouldn’t survive. Since I’d rather avoid death, at least until my Ephemeral Rebirth was recharged, I drank a bottled breath potion from the supply leftover from climbing the mountains in Crysite. While Orykson had forced me to learn to draw air into my lungs from Dusk’s realm in an emergency, it was still something that took a bit of focus, while the potion worked on its own. Thus, the potion was what I used, and then I pressed on, deeper into Deepfall. 

When I arrived at the twenty-sixth sealed floor, I could sense a deep, overwhelming power. The shade of a desolation Arcanist, one that had made it into sixth gate, was resting here. It watched me as I carefully moved through the room, extending my mana senses down beneath me until I could feel into the floor below. When I felt the mana surge, I teleported down, skipping a floor. It was ruder than I had intended to be, but I knew my limits well enough. 

I could fight a fifth gate, sure, but that was with boosting, shielding, and healing spells from Kene, support from my familiars, and a matchup that I was fairly useful against. Alone, against a sixth gate? No, absolutely not. 

When I passed the thirty-ninth floor, I noticed a considerable uptick in both the frequency and potency of mana sources. The floor had two third gate death mana sources, and they were also being used by the spirits of the floor, though one ghost was particularly dominating use of them. It had used the decades and mana to grow to early third gate from nothing. As I debated stepping in or not, one of the weaker ghosts pleaded for my assistance. 

I trapped the hungry ghost in a Spirit Circle. I didn’t use the milkcaps – the ghost didn’t have a physical body to interact with the barrier of force – but I did take the time to arrange one of my fourth gate and two of my third gate mana sources as an offering, and overcharged the circle with all my mana. I didn’t know exactly how long it would be able to hold the ghost, partially since it depended on how powerful the ghost’s ability to attack the spell was, but it should be enough to help the lesser spirits gather enough power to stop being bullied. 

It was also on the thirty-ninth floor that I stopped for the evening. My mana was running low, and I’d drained my carnations several times on the way down. I could keep pushing without either my life or death mana, but fighting a bunch of spirits without access to Cwn Anwnn’s Hunt seemed like a bad idea. The spirits that I had helped were more than happy to let me rest safely on the floor, though they seemed intrigued when I simply vanished into thin air and re-appeared the next morning, completely refreshed. I explained it as a result of a particularly strong spatial effect combined with the strangeness of a spellbond, which was technically true. After a round of goodbyes to the ghosts, and checking the Spirit Circle of the bully one last time, I headed further down into the depths once more. 

As I walked, I contemplated the fact that the power had jumped from first gate to third, and also increased in number. Bad luck on floors that would have formed second gate mana sources? A principle of death mana concentration? The result of hundreds of years of plundering Deepfall? I doubted I would ever know, but it was fun to theorize, even as I cut down the ghost of a serial killer that had broken its seal and eaten all the ghosts of the forty-sixth level. 

When I passed the fifty-second floor, I felt the first natural treasure. Arguably. The term ‘natural treasure’ was fairly vague. There was an argument to be made that my plants were all natural treasures, for example, even though they were plants. The healer’s heart might have a better argument than most, but most of them reproduced just like any other plant. Mana sources also fell into that category, bundles of energy so dense that they crystallized into mana and gained a physical form. But they also just acted like natural sources of mana that could be absorbed to replenish your own, be used in alchemy, or be used in advancing things. 

This natural treasure was not like that. It was a shard of bone, one that seemed to have come from nothing. It was simple enough as treasures went, only growing the walls of a death garden or similar, but it was still an interesting find. I didn’t take it, but I did make note of it before heading further down. 

The seventy-fourth floor had a ghoul in it. I’d never actually seen one of the flesh-eating monsters before, since they weren’t native to anywhere I’d visited. They were strange, almost human looking, like trolls, and the feeling of death, desolation, telluric, and lunar energy that made them up had a distinctly slimy feel, as did the fact that not all of the bones it had piled around it were from the people buried here. Several of them seemed to be from people descending into the depths, which, when combined with their tendency to hibernate for years at a time, explained how it was alive. How it had gotten stuck this deep in the cemetery, rather than climbing up to eat the fresher bodies above, I didn’t know. 

I foxstepped around the room, dodging its apoplectic attacks as I flicked Fungal Locks and Fungal Siphon over it, until I had completely drained it of spare energy, then left it passed out, contained within a ring of blue barrier milkcaps. I was going to have to be more sparing with their use, if I kept planting them around like this. Ah well. It was dark and damp, I was sure they’d thrive here. 

Walking through the ninety-seventh floor was deeply strange. There was a set of six ghosts, but no shades, and all of the ghosts were Arcanists. If I didn’t know better, I would have said they were spellbonded to one another, but unless a particularly strange and extremely powerful natural treasure had formed down here, I didn’t think that was possible. They weren’t aggressive, not like the shade above had been, so I walked through the level to see if I had missed anything. 

“We can give you the knowledge you seek,” one of them whispered, their voice a cold whispering wind across a graveyard in autumn. 

“You can tell me how to save Kene?” 

“We can,” a second one said, this one’s voice deep and rumbling like stone. “We can serve you and assist in the claiming of what it is you need.” 

“What do I need, exactly?” 

“You know as well as we,” a third said, their voice high and alto. “There is no need to play coy.” 

“Do I?” I asked mildly. “I don’t know that I do, honestly. Orykson would.” 

There was a moment of silence through the room at that.

“Orykson’s my mentor,” I elaborated. “Well, one of them. Ikki is another, bu–” 

“We do not know of this Orykson. But how does one seek without knowing what they search for?” a fourth, this one sounding like a tinkling bell, asked. 

“But I thought you knew what I needed?” I asked wryly. “Or were you just hoping to get something out of me? If you’re wanting to leave–” 

“We must take over full command of a body, so that we might be reborn,” the first one who had spoken said. “Yours seems potent. It perhaps will not shred itself apart under the pressure of our spirits, as so many others have.” 

“Ah,” I said. “No. I’m not interested.” 

Given that they were all ghosts, and that they seemed to need to get me to agree to a deal, I was guessing this was a function of their legacy – legacies? 

“We figured, when you began to question us as so,” the fifth one said, their voice a braying, basso, elephantine trumpet. “A wise man would depart us now, and not linger on our floor on our way up.” 

I took the hint and continued walking down. The one hundred and third floor was an interesting place, and one I didn’t know entirely what to make of it. The entire floor had been completely blasted apart by someone with magic. It looked like even the shelving had been reduced to nothing more than ash. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the floor was absolutely overflowing with death and desolation energy, and it had spawned a pair of elementals, one of each type. I tried to talk to each of them, but neither one seemed sapient. In fact, they didn’t even really seem to notice me unless I was actively poking them with my mana senses, and even then, they just poked back, then left alone. 

I opened a portal for them, wondering if they were interested in escaping to somewhere else. Both of the spirits recoiled from the influx of new energy types into the room, so I decided it was best to just leave them be. 

When I arrived at the one hundred and seventeenth floor, however, I tensed.

“Primes…”