The sixth pack dissolved into vapor and ash.
Cal had stopped watching the kills three turns back, after the party reduced a pack of bracket fungus golems to smoldering compost in under four seconds. He'd learned as much as he could from observing D-tier combatants obliterate fodder, especially when their magic was all cast internally. The monsters died too fast, the delvers fighting with such speed and coordination that their techniques blurred together into an engine of destruction.
So he turned inward, switching his [Spiritual Perception] to its directional mode and pushing the beam ahead of the group.
The dungeon fought him immediately. The very matter of the reality shard was saturated with raw essence, rendering the stone walls and floor spiritually opaque. Once they'd crossed the barrier's threshold, his spiritual reach was confined to his visual range.
He thought of the goblin cavern beneath the Old Quarry. Being in complete darkness, running for his life in hostile territory, and the desperate need to see. He'd solved it then by stripping his perception down to its unique function: spatial data only.
The spiritual frequencies condensed in the stone of the corridor were stopping him from pressing through. He just needed to remove them.
He narrowed the beam, compressed his Intent, and shut off every spiritual channel in his perception like closing valves on a pipe. Resonance, gone. Felt color, gone. Felt texture, taste, all of it, stripped away until the beam carried nothing but physical impressions.
The essence-thick matter became transparent. Irrelevant. His perception punched through it and traveled the stone.
Data flooded back. The left wall, seventeen inches away, rough-hewn granite extending as far as he could perceive. The ceiling, twenty-five feet overhead, descending toward a choke point forty yards to the front. The floor, uneven stone worn smooth by the passage of countless dungeon creatures and delvers. A branching side corridor opened on the right in thirty feet, its entrance partially blocked by a protrusion of rock.
The grayscale wireframe assembled in his mind just as it had in that goblin-infested dark, each scan adding another layer to the three-dimensional blueprint that [Perfect Memory] etched into permanent storage. Corridor by corridor, chamber by chamber, the dungeon's architecture revealed itself from his position.
Let's see if I can be more than just a tagalong, he thought. Then he pushed the beam further, building his picture of the dungeon one silent sweep at a time.
Twenty minutes and two more waves of monsters later, Hope angled right at a T-junction without breaking stride, her path confident from a route long memorized. The left fork led to a short tunnel with a dead end, dismissed without a glance.
Cal's beam swept left as they passed.
Solid stone. Solid stone. Solid stone. And then.
A gap.
A small grotto, barely the size of a walk-in closet, hollowed from the rock behind a thin screen of stone three inches thick. The chamber's interior was uneven, its walls curving organically around a central point and something that looked like a flower, but it was hard to tell with the low resolution feedback his beam provided.
The delvers were three steps past it.
"Hold."
His voice sounded loud to his own ears.
The entire party stopped. Zamir raised his shield and dropped into a defensive crouch, while Filip reached for his scimitar hilt.
Eight pairs of eyes found Cal.
Angelika spoke first. "What now, boy? Did a shadow startle you?"
Cal ignored her and looked at Ido, pointing to the path not taken. "Down there..." He paused, realizing he needed to be careful what he revealed. "I felt something. I don't know how else to describe it."
Ido sighed, "Hope is our scout, and one of the best in the business. If there was something down that path she would have noticed it."
"He felt a draft," Angelika said, one hand waving a languid dismissal. "Must we halt for every breeze? I desire to finish this endeavor quickly."
Hope looked from Cal to the untraveled tunnel, her eyes bright and curious. A gleam of professional interest crossed her freckled face.
"Boss." She tilted her head toward Ido. "Some people just have a nose for these things. My grand-uncle could smell gold through six feet of rock, and the old bastard was never wrong. Call it a delver's hunch." She shrugged. "We're making good time. A five-minute detour won't kill us."
While she spoke, Aurelian took action. He stepped down the skipped section of corridor and pressed his right palm flat against the stone at the far end. A yellow light pulsed from beneath his fingers and sank into the rock like water into dry sand.
He held the contact for three seconds. Four.
Then he frowned and muttered, "There's a hollow."
Ido processed this for but a moment, his eyes tracking from where Aurelian pressed on the stone to Cal and back again. Then he nodded once.
"Zamir, open it."
The giant didn't ask for clarification. He shifted his grip on the warhammer, stepped past Cal with a rumbling grunt, and swung.
The wall exploded inward.
Stone fragments sprayed into the hidden space, clattering and bouncing off unseen surfaces in a cascade of percussive reports. Dust billowed outward in a choking cloud that caught Angelika's white light and turned it into a diffuse, swirling haze. Cal coughed, waving the grit from his face, and stepped back as the dust settled.
The small chamber was eventually revealed as Ido cast an air Spell to disperse the dust. At its center, growing from a thin fissure in the floor, stood a single flower.
It was a lily, perhaps eight inches tall, its stem a translucent crystal that caught and refracted the overlapping light of four orbs into a prismatic spray across the grotto's walls. Five petals, each paper-thin and luminous, gathered light along their edges and blazed with an inner radiance. A violet glow that pulsed in time with some unknown beat.
His [Spiritual Perception] found it and nearly buckled.
The lily's aura was a revelation. Through the synesthetic lens of his perception, its spiritual resonance sang: a frequency so clear, so perfectly sustained, that it bypassed interpretation and made his spirit resonate in sympathy. The felt color was a white so complete it contained every other color within it, a condensed spectrum of life force that radiated outward in gentle waves. And the felt taste differed from anything he'd ever experienced, more conceptual than sensory.
The taste of… sleep well-earned? Of, of hunger satisfied. Of youth preserved against the slow theft of time.
Hope let out an excited whoop.
She was past Zamir before the sound had finished leaving her lips, her compact frame slipping through the shattered opening quick as a cat. She brought her hands together, and a distortion of displaced air marked the activation of her void ring. Two objects materialized: a small, rune-etched box of dark wood, its lid already open, and a narrow knife with a vibrant green blade that snared the lily's light and held it.
A jade cutter. Cal recognized it from one of Selara's texts. It was on his list of things to eventually buy, but that currently wasn't affordable or worth the investment, since the odds of him finding something that required it for harvesting were so low. The runic-enhanced material property of the jade would temporarily seal the lily's vital essence at the moment of severance, helping preserve its potency during transport. Without it, the flower's concentrated life force would begin dissipating the instant the stem was cut, bleeding away over time more quickly.
Hope knelt, and her breathing slowed. The casual, wry energy that had until now defined her every movement drained away. Absolute focus took its place, transforming her. She held the jade blade carefully, angling it against the crystal stem at a point just above the root fissure. Her free hand hovered above the open box, positioned to receive.
One cut. Clean and swift, the jade edge passing through the crystal stem with a musical ping that lingered in the air like the last note of a song. The lily separated from its root and settled into Hope's waiting palm. She lowered it into the rune-etched box with the reverent care of a mother placing an infant in its crib, closed the lid, and pressed her thumb against a rune on the clasp. The box hummed once, the runes along its edges flaring with light, then settling.
She stood and turned, the box cradled against her chest.
"What is that?" Cal kept the question to a murmur.
Selara moved closer to his side. She stared at the sealed box with an expression Cal hadn't seen on her before: genuine, unguarded wonder, the practical armor of the woman momentarily set aside.
"A Vitae Lily." The name left her lips almost breathlessly. "It's a peak longevity treasure. Priceless to anyone who has ever burned their Vitality for power and felt the years vanish from the end of their life. The Illuminet houses, the Legion champions and commanders… anyone who walks a path of consequence and sacrifice..." She trailed off, then looked at him. Something soft and complicated flitted behind her eyes. "The right buyer could use that flower to restore decades of lost life. It is the kind of treasure that noble houses could go to war over. A bidding war, hopefully."
Hope slipped the box into her void ring with a hiss of displaced air, and it was gone.
Ido turned to Cal.
The warmth was back in his face, broader and more genuine than ever, the satisfaction in it bordering on disbelief. He reached into a pouch at his belt and produced a D-tier essence stone, then flicked it through the air to Cal.
Catching it, Cal thought the weight was absurd for something so small. It sat in his palm like a marble carved from lead, warm to the touch, its surface perfectly smooth. His [Spiritual Perception] sang with the contact, the stone's aura flooding his senses.
"Finder's fee," Ido said, his tone easy. "That discovery just made the entire expedition worth the trip."
Cal closed his fingers around the stone. A D-tier essence stone. The value was staggering. Hundreds of gold, easily. More than everything he owned, more than everything he'd earned in all his weeks of adventuring combined, compressed into a red rock.
But the elation lasted exactly as long as it took his [Savant of the Mind] to do the math.
Worth kingdoms. And I just got paid a single stone.
He looked up from the stone in his hand, past Ido's satisfied grin, past Hope's excited expression, to the space where the void ring had swallowed the rune-etched box.
"How much is the lily worth?" Cal asked.
Selara went very still beside him, but Aurelian answered, his arms folded across his chest as he eyed the grotto.
"An item that stands at the pinnacle of a given tier has no fixed market price. It is the foundation upon which noble houses build their legacies. Heirs are conceived, marriages arranged, and political alliances forged around treasures of this caliber." He paused, looking back at Cal meaningfully. "But if you were to quantify it in something pedestrian like essence stones... a D-tier Vitae Lily would be worth thousands of those little baubles you just earned."
His stomach dropped.
Thousands?
The stone Cal held, moments ago a fortune beyond his imagining, shrank. In the space between one heartbeat and the next it transformed from a treasure into a tip. A pat on the head. A bone tossed to a dog who'd found the scent.
His elation died.
Cal engaged [Diplomacy] and drew on decades of corporate experience, masking his mounting frustration beneath a veneer of professional courtesy.
"I appreciate the immediate payment, Ido," Cal said neutrally. "But given the incredible value of the lily, shouldn't we discuss a proportional distribution for the entire party?"
Angelika let out a clipped scoff, a dismissive note of pure contempt.
Ido changed. The warmth was removed, callously stripped away to reveal a face Cal hadn't seen before. His friendly, crinkling brown eyes went flat and hard. "What distribution? You've been paid your finder's fee."
Cal drew a breath. "But that's—"
Selara clamped down on his forearm, five fingers pressing into the leather of his bracer with pressure that would leave bruises. She spoke softly and urgent, pitched for his ears alone.
"The waterfall, Cal. Remember the waterfall."
He grimaced at the thought, but self-preservation won out over his mounting frustration.
Looking from Ido's glacial face to the others, he saw Filip lounging against the corridor wall, one hand resting on his scimitar, observing the exchange with hungry interest. Zamir stood motionless, his shield still up, giving nothing away. Angelika wore a satisfied smile, the closest thing to genuine pleasure he'd witnessed from her. Hope was already looking away, her attention drifting to the corridor ahead, her face professionally blank. And near the back, the hooded figure watched the exchange without movement, his silence more unnerving than Filip's open threat.
There were no allies there, only those enjoying the confrontation or waiting for it to run its inevitable course.
Cal looked down at the nobleman's boots, fists clenched at his sides.
Ido continued to stare for one more second, measuring, assessing. Then the warmth returned to his face as if it'd never left, and he walked over to clap Cal on the shoulder with earnest-seeming camaraderie.
"Good lad. Let's move."
The party reformed, and Selara fell back beside him as the march resumed. She waited until the others were out of earshot before she spoke. "It is the tyranny of power, Cal. It is not personal. You have to be strong enough to demand your share. Until then, you take what you are given."
Cal scowled as he matched her pace. "You have power. If you'd just spoken up, Ido would have listened to you."
"Ido is only one man. He might prefer a peaceful resolution, but he leads a volatile team. If I challenged his authority over a priceless treasure, I would back him into a corner." She stared off for a moment. "But maybe you are right. Maybe I should have—"
Aurelian let out a harsh laugh from the other side of her. "A dangerously naïve consideration, sister. I think your first instincts were more accurate."
"Ido would not sanction a murder over a natural treasure. Not with us here."
"He would not order it," Aurelian said, continuing to mutter under his breath. "...honestly, relying on the sentimentality of a spurned boy..." He raised his volume. "But if the Halmis struck the first blow to secure their payout, what do you think our erstwhile leader would do? Side with a disgraced alchemist and an old crush against his current team? We had rapport once, but you know that does not supersede the expedience of their situation."
He pinned his sister with an intense stare. "He would have mended their wounds and helped them bury us in that grotto."
Selara looked away. She offered no defense.
Murder? Cal thought. Would they really have killed me over it? He thought about the casual butchery he'd witnessed since coming to Veraxus, especially when it came to the powerful and the powerless.
Yes. Yes, of course they would have. The idea sent a shiver through him that helped to cool his anger.
Cal marched onward. Inside his pouch, the D-tier stone rested against his hip like a lump of coal.
There's no way I'm settling for one stone after that bologna, Cal thought. One way or another, I'm going to collect on what's owed.
His anger finally stopped burning. It resolved into a hard, functional edge. Through the flawless recall of [Perfect Memory], he locked the scene into permanent storage. He recorded the emptiness of how Ido had looked at him, the lazy threat from Filip, and his own utter lack of options.
Yeah. I get it. This was a lesson in leverage. I lacked the strength to enforce a claim, so I walked away with scraps.
He picked up his pace.
Never. Again.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I hope you all enjoyed the chapter and are enjoying the world building. I'm tapped out, so I'm going to leave it there today. Have a great weekend.
Jon