I held my hand against the statue and invoked fast travel, jumping to the top floor. Sense presence picked up nothing in the room with me, and a glance around revealed nothing suspicious. Apparently, it was no longer being watched.

I took a more careful look around and saw nothing I recognised as having moved since the last time I'd been here. I could still pick up the dragon over in his cavern, too. My original respawn cave and pet murder tree's cavern were far out of range, so while I couldn't sense the warrior commander, that wasn't enough to claim he wasn't still here. I could pick up some of the closer star-wolves, but beyond that, there was nothing. It seemed that upstairs was still safe.

First off, I went to gather more of the spider queen's webs. Even if they were her no-effort inferior product, they were still far better than anything I could make, and my armour needed patching up. And no doubt would need more patching in the future. Next, I went to visit the centipedes, gathering up more shell segments, both thick and thin. With my new, much larger item box, I could afford to stockpile.

And it really was much larger. It didn't have any sort of fullness gauge, and I wouldn't know it was full until it refused to let me add anything more, but there were several panthers caught in the webs again, and after killing them, I found I could store the entire corpses. All of them. I couldn't store the giant centipede though, so there was some limit. Nevertheless, it was a big one, and I could stockpile food, resources, and equipment with impunity. I even kept the panther corpses in case I ever had the chance to cook them.

Resources gathered, I made my armour repairs.

Improvisational artisan advanced to level 13

With my newfangled, supersized item box, I should pack more water too, so I made my way to the brook, keeping watch for the warrior leader. Was he even still here? It took me a few attempts to produce waterproof bags using my own silk, leaving me wishing I could handle the stuff with the same fidelity as the real spiders, but I got there in the end. Perhaps the one on my bum was better in some way? No, even if it was, I was just going to pretend that one didn't exist. Whatever I could do with my hands would have to be good enough.

I still wanted some rigid containers, and I had a couple of canteens I'd looted from the fox-kin mines, but they only stored around a litre each. I could do a bit of reinforcement of my bags by threading bits of shell into them, but they were still a bit squishy, and didn't have lids.

Actually, given that my item box now stopped time, I should take bags full of the centipede's hardening fluid too, if it was still good. It should remain liquid in my item box. It involved a bit of backtracking, but I was sure I'd find a use for it later.

Liquid supplies restocked, I risked checking out my old respawn area. How was I supposed to sneak in such a way as to hide myself from anyone with a sense presence type ability? The last time, the commander had been able to detect me the moment I set foot outside my respawn cave. No matter how carefully or quietly I tread, it wasn't going to prevent that. I couldn't pick him up now though, even when standing right by the crevice. I crept in, only to find a pile of rubble a few metres down the passageway. So, he'd collapsed it all, then. What a pain. I wouldn't be able to reach my pet murder tree, assuming he hadn't collapsed that chamber too.

Luckily, with my new abilities, there was nothing left behind in the tree's room that I needed. Everything there could be reproduced within minutes, aside from some beetle and spider materials that I no longer had any need for.

Next up was a visit to the cliff, to get a view of the floor below, and what I saw was beyond anything I'd expected. The town was gone completely, with no lights at all in the area. Near where the town had been were occasional patches of unnatural darkness visible to my dark-vision, not merely an absence of light, but straight out the other side into whatever magical phenomenon lay beyond. My best guess was that they were blighted copses of crystal trees. There were no lights around them, so presumably an attempt had been made to stem the spread by clearing more of the crystal trees to build some sort of firebreak.

That had the implication that despite the loss of the town, there was something down there alive and intelligent enough to understand a firebreak was needed, and build one. Was that fox-kin that had fled the town? Was it something else? Oh, please don't be the spider queen... She had been pissed at me already, so I really didn't want to meet her now, having blighted her food supply...

I noted that there were none of the patches of darkness to the left of the town. According to my map, there was a particularly extensive mine shaft in that area. Had they evacuated there? Another area to add to my places to avoid list, then.

Wanting to avoid the spider queen, I took the passage down instead. If they'd lost the whole town, surely they wouldn't have enough manpower to keep their checkpoint manned? Alas, while my assumption was correct, that didn't mean they'd left the door open. Thankfully, with no-one guarding it, I had as much time as I needed to demolish the wall with my pickaxe. It took longer than I'd have expected, possibly enchanted or something, but at least it wasn't completely indestructible, like the catacomb walls seemed to be.

I stepped through the hole, and found to my disappointment that the cannons that had been there were gone, as was anything else that may have been worth looting. I was considering having a play with those cannons in case they could penetrate the catacomb walls. After being trapped in the shrine room, it had become obvious that I needed some way to break through them, or I wouldn't even get another shot at the boss that I assumed was controlling the area.

And even that was an assumption; I still hadn't had a chance to appraise it. The one in actual control could have been anywhere.

I made my way to the town, avoiding any patches of trees, blighted or otherwise, only to find that it simply wasn't there. What was there was a sizeable crater. How was I supposed to loot a crater?! Was the staircase down still intact? Was anything? What about Ja'yakril's house? It had been outside of the walls, while whatever had destroyed the town had hit the inside, so maybe it had been protected some small amount. Obviously not a lot, because if it was still upright I'd be able to see it, but maybe it hadn't been completely obliterated?

I made my way to where my map indicated the house had been, and then walked away from the blast location, treading around debris and utilising sense mana to locate anything of interest.

Sense mana advanced to level 7

There was actually something there! I started shifting a pile of rubble, digging up a small box. It was full of tiny things that looked very much like mana crystals. And the reason they looked like mana crystals was because they were, or so claimed my appraisal skill. They were titchy though, and to sense mana were nowhere near as bright as the others I'd seen. I'd be willing to bet they weren't worth a hundred mana.

Even if they were worth thousands, I doubted I could use them to repair the temple shrine... Was it possible to build a shrine from scratch?

I continued my search, in the hopes of finding something more, but nothing else lit up to sense mana. There might be more mundane things under there, but it was hardly practical to search everything.

That was a disappointing result, but given the state of the town, not a surprising one. My next job would be a search of where the temple used to be, to see if I could find any remains of the shrine or the staircase. I turned around to begin the walk.

Only to find a fox-kin in front of me.

Sense presence wasn't responding, which was presumably why I'd completely missed his approach, but one look at his face was enough to tell me that was because he was blocking it, and not because he was weak. Besides, novice empath was telling me nothing either. Not that I needed it to see the utter hatred in his expression. What about appraisal?

Mru'walyn, vulpes sagax

Detailed appraisal blocked

Mru? Now that I got a good look at his face, I could easily believe he was one of the three at the front in that courthouse style place. So, following what I knew of their naming scheme, this was the leader of the mage caste?

"What do you want?" I asked dejectedly, activating trigger respawn. "I do my best to avoid you, yet you insist on interfering, over and over and over, regardless of the way it never ends well. Can't you just pretend I don't exist or something?"

"You murder more than three thousand people, and expect us to just ignore you?" he answered. "And don't give me any bullshit about us taking you after you were infected and carelessly bringing you into the town. We know full well you deliberately pulled an infected shield out of the subspace storage ability you use and infected both yourself and the one carrying you. No doubt you were hoping to spread enough chaos to escape."

Drat. Another intelligent one. "So, you admit kidnapping?"

"No, I admit using reasonable force to bring you to trial, after you caused a conflict that decimated the fighting force of our settlement. But the evidence we had was already pointing at you not being at fault. Had you simply cooperated, your safety would have been assured. But that no longer matters. You will be returning with me, whether you want to or not, and I will have you make up for the damage you've caused by saving the rest of us."

"The hell? You expected me to cooperate with you after my first visit resulted in someone trying to stick a slave collar on me, and my second visit had me tortured?! You expected me to believe another attempt would be any different?"

Not to mention how close his phrasing of 'your safety would have been assured' was to Ja'yakril's reassurances when he was trying to slave-collar me. It was not at all the same as saying 'you would have been free to go'.

"The perpetrators of those events were killed. I believe you witnessed their heads outside our town. But it matters little. I merely wanted to speak to you while I had the chance, to see if you would at least offer an apology for the dead. It seems you have no regrets over your actions. And I see from your appearance that you decided to throw off some of your veneer of people-hood, too. Sleep."

Curse tolerance advanced to level 6

I looked around in confusion, only to find that I was back in the catacombs. Alarmed, I performed a quick emergency check, which revealed that there was still no-one here and that there were still no exits. With that settled, I returned to the most important question; how had I just got here? The last thing I remembered... The arch-mage had hit me with a sleep spell. Thank goodness I'd activated trigger respawn beforehand. No, thank goodness he'd felt the need to brag at me beforehand! If he had hit me with that from behind, rather than waiting for me to turn around...

Right, apparently I need to keep trigger respawn active at all times when traversing fox-kin territory from now on.

It still left the question open of what they had done while I slept. I was still wearing my armour, and aside from my item box, there was no way it could be removed without damaging it, so I doubt they mistreated my body. Were they just waiting for me to wake up? No... The last thing he said to me, about talking while he had the chance. They intended to keep me asleep forever. Would my resistance have eventually saved me? Would I have died of old age? How would I know if I had? He could block my other skills. What if he blocked trigger respawn too? Had I just skipped seventy years?

What if it wasn't just sleep? What if they had some sort of temporal stasis, like my item box? Wouldn't that stop trigger respawn even if it was active and unblockable? Dying after an hour wouldn't help if an hour never passed from my perspective.

Once again, I was thankful for friend of fear letting me think things through calmly and rationally. On the balance of probability, it was unlikely they blocked trigger respawn, simply because they hadn't had knowledge of it. That may have changed now, though, having watched me die for no reason while asleep.

I'd once told Mi'taan that I had an average lifespan of a day, and hadn't clarified that was because things kept killing me. The best-case scenario was that they assumed I'd died of old age. Unfortunately, that hadn't been the first time I'd died suddenly. Also, the armour I was wearing would have suddenly vanished, despite me being unconscious. Next best scenario would be if no-one had been actively watching me, and they thought I'd woken up. But that was unlikely, too.

I've never measured the respawn time precisely. Was it exactly an hour? Or close enough that he may have picked up on the timespan between meeting me and my sleeping body's death? Did he notice that it matched the time lag between when the warrior commander attacked the temple and my alleged murder? Or my capture at the upstairs shrine and my supposed death from blight? I had to assume that they had not only worked out trigger respawn, but had also uncovered the possibility that I faked those deaths. Maybe they would think it was something that activated automatically if I was incapacitated, rather than something I needed to trigger manually?

And it wasn't just trigger respawn... The spider queen had released that priestess, and I'd told her about my resistance abilities. I needed to assume they knew that, too. Her information would have let them know that the spider queen had been able to keep me paralysed the whole time, and only needed to increase the frequency of my doses of poison to compensate, so they wouldn't think things were so important that they couldn't leave me sleeping for an hour, but it meant they would plan for me becoming progressively more resistant to whatever they used to send me to sleep.

That trip had been a disaster. I'd not found anything that would help me move around this maze, and I'd leaked vital information to the fox-kin. Admittedly, there wasn't anything I could have done to avoid it, but that didn't change the fact that I was now terrified of travelling upstairs.

I'd gone from the high of having another copy of myself to mess around and enjoy my time with, with the two of us seemingly undefeatable by the monsters on this floor, to trapped, alone, helpless and afraid. What was I supposed to do now?

His sleep spell had levelled curse resistance. I could start by training that resistance further. I drew my sword of paralysis from my item box and began to cut.