The Third Portal: Chapter Thirty-Four

“I don’t get it,” Liz said, glancing at the tower’s ruins. “There’s hardly anything here. It’s a standard guard outpost.” 

The spell had led us here, and was insistent that I was right in front of the array piece, but I agreed with Liz’s statement. The ruined tower had a handful of broken and rotting dressers, tables, chairs, and cabinets. I thought I could sense a couple of weak, almost fizzled enchantments somewhere in the rubble, but nothing that would indicate the full power of a city-spanning soul array. 

I shifted my mana senses through the rubble, and even down into the earth, remembering the lessons from both the myrmekes and the fungal infection, but I could still feel nothing of note. There were a few small sources of mana underground, probably buried in the collapse, but again there was nothing to indicate something powerful had once been here.

“Hold on,” Ed said, then closed his eyes. He placed his hand on the ground and cast Analyze Earth. After several long moments of sweeping his awareness through the dirt and stone, he rose and cast Stone Shape. Despite the spell’s name, it didn’t allow the free manipulation of stone, but rather, acted more like a held knife, creating cuts in the rock where he gestured. 

He swept his arm back and forth, and Dusk flew over to help him, plying out parts of the rock and earth. I watched as, after several minutes, the pair exposed a cellar door. 

“Cellars are weird,” I said. “It’s weird to think that not too long ago, we needed room sized enchantments and the earth’s natural insulation to keep things cold.” 

“Stunning commentary,” Liz said, pulling out her sword and smashing in the half-rotted wood of the door, then slipping it back into her spirit. She used a flicker of ungated mana to conjure a light and began walking down the cellar. 

“For what it’s worth, I think you’ve got a point,” Kene said, before we headed down the stairs and into the cellar. 

It had very clearly been a target of looting in the mass exodus from Crysite following the Song of Spring’s death. There were smashed open chests that were surprisingly well preserved thanks to the cool, dry air. Barrel racks sat without barrels, and apart from a handful of empty, dirty glass jars, some of which had also been smashed, nothing stood out to me. 

“Primes,” I swore. “Well, Ed, Dusk, you two are the most earth- attuned of us. Feel anything?” 

Even as I spoke, I was pushing my own mana senses at the walls, poking and prodding for any secret exits. There had to be something, because Orykson’s spell was still going absolutely buck wild, insisting that I was right at the array. 

We shuffled over the room twice, each of us poking at any stone that we could, knocking on the walls and floor, and using our various sensory spells to look for any potential paths. Liz even sketched out Analyze Lunar, using the strange amalgam of thermal, shadow, and liquid sensing abilities that it gave, but to no avail. I was getting close to calling it a bust when Dawn emerged from my spirit and tilted her head, looking curiously at me. I explained what we were doing, and she stared at me. 

She radiated a lot of confusion, and seemed to project images into my mind of a massive black orb, and curiosity that I couldn’t see it. Dusk whistled, agreeing that none of us could. Dawn then sunk into the floor, her mana sparking around her. Several moments later, there was a rumbling as a passage opened in the wall, revealing a second set of stairs. 

These spiraled downward in a tight circle, forcing us into a single file line, where we descended what had to be at least forty feet, before we emerged in a large underground laboratory, with its lights still on. Several of them had burnt out, the old enchantments unable to sustain the throughput of mana, but the entire thing was very clearly expensive and well kept. 

There were tables that ran along the wall, covered in complex enchanting work that I didn’t understand in the least. A second ring of tables covered in formations stood in the center of the room, with dials and levers worked in alongside areas to place mana sources. In the center of the second ring there was a giant black sphere. The ball was shiny, almost glassy or chitinous, and it was suspended by four wires that ran into the wall at different angles, making the points of the six-pointed star. 

Most of the lab seemed to have long ago been powered off, the black sphere not glowing, the levers and indicators on the tables dull, but there were a few things still up. I could sense bundles of abnegation mana forming wards that ran power into the hidden stairwell, which had presumably been why we were having such trouble finding the hidden lab. The stasis spells, nodes of temporal and abnegation mana in the walls, also seemed to remain active, though low on power, along with the lights and the temperature control, though they were slowly failing as well. 

“Fancy,” Liz said, glancing around. “Is this thing what you need?” 

I nodded as Orykson’s spell began to feed instructions back to me. 

“Without access to a ghost of the Song of Spring, or some other remnant of his mind, there are large sections of the array that are completely locked to us,” I said, hopping over the middle ring of the tables and looking for the hidden indent in the orb. “Most of those functions were the ones that helped intersect it with the geomantic arrays here on the island, though. We don’t need those, not unless we were to try and create something like this permanently, and that’s too expensive.” 

I pressed the indent, and Aerde’s mana shot into the orb, hacking its internal defenses. An instant later, there was a loud click as the bottom half of the orb swung open to reveal a mess of materials and enchantments inside. Guided by the knowledge packet, I shoved my hands into the guts of the machine, pulling out critical components and tossing them into Dusk. 

“We’re going to need both Dusk and Dawn to help with this, but for right now, we should look around here to see if there’s any fuel leftover. There should be a storage tank containing hyper-compressed liquid death mana, tanks for watered down versions of the three false deep mana elixirs, a tank of a white goo that feels a lot like hudau mana or my beastgate mana, and a tank of pink goo that feels like a mixture of dreams, shadows, light, and raw creation.” 

I bit down on a gear, holding it in place with my teeth as I wiggled my fingers to pull out a breathsoul lash. I didn’t even know what a breathsoul was, or why it had a lash, but I didn't really need to – it was on the list of components, and there was one right here. 

With Kene, Ed, Liz, and our bonds looking for the tanks, it took us about twenty minutes to loot the place, stripping it bare. All of the spare tanks had already been taken when the Song had died and people had started the mass exodus, but there was still a bit of power remaining in the ones plugged into the enchantments, with the most abundant one being the pink goop of creation. 

In addition to the power that had naturally formed here, the concentration of mana with the remnants of the array had also caused a natural treasure to form. 

The smooth, light brown, oblong orb reminded me of a really big chicken egg, and Kene identified it as a bondegg. The treasure allowed someone to form their spellbonds before reaching third gate, which could theoretically give the effects two additional gates worth of growth, or help a sapient beast take on a human form early. 

It was a very useful tool, but also one that nobody could use. Even Dawn, the only member of us weak enough to use it, had already formed her dominion and connected it to me, and thus wasn’t able to use it. As such, the bondegg, along with the components I’d pulled out, and the tanks of mana, went into Dusk’s vault, and we headed out again. 

“Alrighty,” I said. “Next closest one is… That way.” 

I pointed, and we started making our way in that direction, with me occasionally performing funerary services for the people who had died in their attempt to leave. The slums slowly transformed into a middle class neighborhood, where some of the buildings were still in decent shape. Not much here was incredibly valuable, and to everyone’s amusement, the houses that had been here seemed to have been looted with far more intensity than any of the ones in the slums had ever been. 

Finding the node in this region was much easier, and I let out a curse when I saw it. This one hadn’t been hidden, presumably because the Song of Summer had been working with pretty classist ideas. Unfortunately for us, that meant that the entire place had been utterly looted, and we were unable to get any more fuel. Even the major node had been cut from the supports, and there were scorch marks and hammer blows visible, cracking its surface, though they hadn’t been able to get in. After Aerde unlocked it, I dug through it for components before we set off again. 

Not long after we set off, I felt something on the edge of my mana senses and we took a brief detour to pick up a natural treasure that had been formed here. It was sitting in what had once been a person’s backyard in-ground pool, and seemed to look like a fist sized chunk of shimmering white-blue pearl, with streaks of purple shooting through it. It was actually Liz who was the first to identify it. 

“A shallow-drowning pearl,” she said, lifting it from the long-evaporated pool. She put it down and bowed to the pearl, mumbling under her breath for a moment, as if paying her respects, then looked up at us and explained. 

“They’re rare, and uh. Well, no way to say this lightly, but they don’t form for the best reason. They’re formed when a parent drowns their child in shallow water in an area with high concentrations of death mana, and the area is then abandoned for at least half a century. The ghost and shades left behind eventually collapse and form into one of these, which can sit in a lunar mana garden and cause water spells to gain a sort of drowning effect, making the thing that was attacked need to focus in order to breathe.”

“That’s horrifying,” I said to general agreement, even Liz nodding. 

“It is. Which is why they’re – thankfully – quite rare, despite the potency of the effect.”  

She glanced between everyone, focusing largely on myself and Dusk

“Do you mind if I take it? I’ll give Malachi and Dusk both seventy-five points, and can pay you a little bit of cash, Kene. it’s worth more than a hundred and fifty, probably closer to eight hundred, but I don’t have that many.”

“There’s no sense in throwing away power that can be used,” I said. “You’ll at least respect where it came from and put it to good use.” 

Dusk agreed, rustling like wind in the trees to say that the dead weren’t going to come back. At least she could use what they lost for good. 

“Of course,” Ed said, a sad smile on his face, while Kene squeezed my hands. 

“No need to pay me. I just expect that if we find any healing treasures, that I can take it from you all.” 

Liz accepted that and absorbed the pearl. After spending a few minutes getting used to the new power, we set off again, making our way towards the third node of the array.