He didn’t start moving.

Well, that’s not entirely true: one of his hands flopped off of his lap once Ephi had managed to chew through the bindings around his wrists.

However he got himself into this situation, he’d have to figure his own way out of it, and we’d have to just be satisfied with the small part we played in it. It was a good deed, but I couldn’t help but recognize how hollow of a sentiment it was. Maybe he had a few tricks up his sleeves.

“Let’s leave him be. We’ve done all we can, unless you feel like carrying him out of here on your back,” I suggested.

She looked him over from top to bottom before shaking her head, whiskers twitching in the cold. “I don’t believe I could.”

“Then we’ve done all we can for him right now.”

“I’ll check the other cart now, then,” she affirmed.

The rat’s nose poked out through the canvas flaps sealing the back of the wagon, glancing from one side to the other to make sure she wasn’t at risk of being spotted. Convinced that the coast was clear, she leapt out and down to the still-wet road below. Turning back around, she quickly caught up to the cart at the front, carefully maneuvering to not get stepped on by the tiredly stomping hooves of the yak-like beasts pulling the wagons. Hopping into the next carriage took her two tries, the rat's legs struggling to find a proper time to jump. There was a rattle of metal coming from within each time the wheels hit an irregularity in the road’s surface.

Weapons. Swords and spears were laid out neatly, tied down in bundles to prevent them from moving around too much. Leather-wrapped bouquets of steel-tipped arrows were along the sides. Enough weapons to arm a decent-sized militia. Nothing too impressive as far as craftsmanship went—cheaply-produced weapons for the rank and file, as far as I could tell.

Worthless to us. The only use they’d serve for me would be as scrap metal, but it wasn’t as if Ephi would be able to lug any of it back either way. She dug around for a bit longer, finding where the soldiers stashed their possessions and supplies. Small, cloth-wrapped bundles of food, only enough to feed this many men for about a week. Bedrolls, tents, and other supplies too—but no coin. Each passing moment took her further from home and increased the risk of her finally getting noticed. It seemed that she realized this as well, judging by the growing impatience with which she was rooting through the cabin’s contents.

“Must be a weapons shipment,” I explained, “Pretty reliable moneymaker I’d imagine. Given the quality, I’d guess… maybe made for a militia? Or for individual sale to the lower class. They’re too basic in design for any noble to be interested in them.”

“What does that mean for us, though?”

I gave what was the equivalent of a half-hearted shrug over our link. “Beats me. Probably nothing, just making observations. There’s always the chance that they’re meant for mercenaries involved in hunting that other core, but their equipment didn’t seem standard issue. Seems like a supply-your-own-gear type of gig. Maybe it’s different up in Ellomere.”

The rat never paused in her searching while I spoke, rifling through the stashed personal belongings of the soldiers as best as she could manage without leaving evidence of our tampering. Since most of their possessions were wrapped in cloth bundles bound by twine, we could only take a surface-level look at what they had brought with them.

Coin would have been our ‘jackpot’, but there seemed to be none for the taking.

It seemed unlikely that the group would actually be travelling without any coin. In fact, it probably would be unwise to leave their coin in the wagon unattended, where a fast-handed coworker might be able to quietly pilfer some. They probably kept it somewhere on their person: in a pouch or a pocket, maybe.

No way Ephi would be able to sneak her way into that.

I’d nearly given up hope of finding anything worth all of the risks Ephi had taken worth the trip when something caught my eye. My rat companion didn’t seem to pay it much mind at all, turning to the side and carrying the object out of my view.

“Wait, turn back a bit, I think I saw something,” I urged, feeling almost like a security guard panning a camera.

There was a neatly-rolled piece of vellum, a yellowed tube wrapped with a leather binding. As she’d passed by, I caught a glimpse of some of the shapes inscribed within. Snaking lines of flaked black ink formed strange patterns fading into shadow, vanishing into the parts of the roll deeper within. There were shapes, countless triangles on a single stilt, clustered together in thick clumps. Trees. A forest.

A map?

“Ephi, this might be worth even more than any money you could have carried home,” I remarked, impressed at her find, “Can you open it?”

She scampered over to the leather strap holding it together, slipping one of her front paws between the parchment and leather and testing the binding. The two ends of the strap met in a tightly-wound knot, which would likely need to be undone to open the thing up. The rat gave it a few good tugs, but this accomplished little.

“It’s not budging. I could chew through, but it will take more time,” she remarked, briefly sitting to stare at the knot as if trying to mentally disassemble it.

“Hm. And it’ll leave evidence that we were here.”

A coin or two going missing was one thing, but they’d probably be suspicious if they noticed a broken strap covered in chew marks. There were parcels of food just nearby, so it would be tough to explain how a wild animal got into the wagon without being noticed and didn’t even go for something actually edible. While the prisoner breaking his bindings could be rationalized easily enough, he wasn’t in this cart. If they caught on, they’d likely realize that someone had helped break the mercenary free—and soon come to the realization that it wasn’t a human that had set him free.

If they started asking those kinds of questions, that could be bad for us.

Still, knowledge of our area was tantalizing bait to have dangled in front of me. Too tempting to not take a bite.

“Go for it. We probably won’t be able to take the whole thing home, but I can just transcribe a copy of it if you can get me a few moments to look,” I explained, “We can take the broken strap with us and abandon it somewhere it won’t be noticed. The less evidence we leave, the better.”

“It’s not as if they won’t notice it’s missing though…”, Ephi responded, giving a worried glance around.

“It’s fine if they notice its absence; there’s a thousand explanations someone could jump to for that. I’d far rather it not be there at all than leave something they might be able to use as a clue.”

Ephi’s teeth made quick enough work of the leather, the snipped loop now falling flat across the ground, the coiled parchment springing outwards now that it wasn’t restrained. It took Ephi some time to unroll it, though spreading it out entirely flat was out of the question. The floor of the wagon was simply too cramped. It was more than enough.

Trails of long-dried ink formed coastlines and rivers, roads and forests. It was clearly handmade, though not in the rough, rushed way it would look if made by unskilled hands. In all likelihood it was a copy of some original, master copy kept safe in some mapmaker’s workshop or someplace similar. Tedious, but necessary work in this kind of world. Probably profitable too, with the amount of labor required for human hands to produce an accurate copy.

Of course, we wouldn’t have time to lovingly craft an exact copy over a handful of days. The less time spent here, the better.

I threw myself into my work, finding an unworked space on a wall in one of the dungeon’s hallways and hastily flattening it out into a suitable workspace. Having to flick my attention back and forth between Ephi’s point of view and back to my own work was dizzying, like swapping between two different radio channels and trying to keep up with the songs from both.

I started by outlining the landmass itself, what seemed to be a peninsula rising northwards from a continent to the south, though the map’s maker had only bothered to include its northernmost coastal reaches and in far less detail than the rest. Whether this was due to unfamiliarity on the cartographer’s part or just irrelevance for this map’s purpose wasn’t clear.

The inner parts of the landmass were host to a range of mountains and hills, with all of the intermediary areas filled with seemingly-untouched forests. A single road cut through the peninsula, running from the northernmost reaches all the way to the south, where the town of Boltha stood. Just to the south of a river delta the forests seemed far sparser, with most of the town’s outskirts seeming to be farmland.

There was only so much to see, though; a hand-drawn map would only show exactly what its author placed upon it. The difference between a small town and a burgeoning city might only be a few extra shapes shoved into an already-cluttered part of the map. There was no telling exactly how many people lived there just from this, though it seemed to cover a decently-wide area.

I continued northwards, copying all of the more important details first like roads, rivers, and mountains; I could fill in the many forests later, if I had time. Notably, the map contained no mention of the adventuring camp set up that Ephi and I had found a while back—too minor of an addition to worry about, or far more likely the camp was simply too new to have been included.

Adding it to my own copy seemed like a good idea, but I needed to figure out where I was first. Once I did that, I could start sprinkling in the various landmarks I knew of: Cheshire’s shrine and the mercenary camp, for starters.

There weren’t many extreme natural landmarks too close to home, which would make judging my location difficult. I was just a short distance away from the coastal cliffs so I could eliminate most of the inland. The immediate area was a mess of hills and valleys, but not quite ‘mountains’—again, those were away from the coast. Aside from that, there was the stream nearby. Assuming it was on the map, that left only a few possibilities.

After a little more deliberation, I managed to pinpoint roughly where ‘home’ was, marking it on the map I was etching into the wall before continuing with the task of transcribing the map.

The northernmost reaches of the land were perhaps the strangest part of all, though. At the very tip sat a city, clearly larger in its domain than Boltha to the south. The title above it simply read, “Dead Ellomere”.

I finished up the map-wall a few minutes later, taking a few shortcuts like representing forests with patterned scribbles of wood hewn into the stone as if they were mineral veins. I could add the details in properly later if I had a rough idea of what to put there. Ephi and I both took this as the best opportunity to leave, with her hopping out of the back of the wagon and vanishing into the snowy night, the leather strap from the map held tightly within her jaws.

Ephi couldn’t read on her own, but that didn’t really stop her from taking in some of the map’s contents—everything besides the labels over the settlements, anyways. She had done her best to roll it back up, but… well, it would be pretty obvious that it had been touched.

So, as she ran home, I mused on what I’d seen.

Dead Ellomere.

What could it mean for a city to be dead? Was it abandoned? Its inhabitants killed by some plague or disaster? It was all just blind speculation. For all I knew, it could be overrun by the undead, though I didn’t have any idea if those existed in this world either.

Was that why Cheshire had told me to go and see for myself when I’d asked?

This had to be why the road was never travelled beyond a certain point, though. Whatever waited in the snowy reaches of the far north, it was a place no one went to, and no one left.

A dead place.

In truth, there was a gnawing curiosity in me to see more—to mount some expedition to the north for no reason other than to finally rip some answers from this world. Yet alongside it flowed something else: a sense of dread.

A feeling that, no matter what I found up there, I wasn’t going to like it.

Why were those men heading to a ‘dead’ city with a prisoner in tow in the middle of a blizzard?

Either way, I couldn’t send one of my employees out on some fool’s errand in the middle of such a harsh winter. Certainly not just to satisfy my own curiosity.

It took Ephi quite some time to return home, trudging through the steadily-rising snow that had quickly reclaimed the road behind the caravan. It was late when she got home, late enough that the sun was nearly rising. I had the manamites bring some food over to her sleeping quarters, but by the time I’d done so she had already dozed off.

She might have come home empty-handed, but it was still quite the help.

I couldn’t even scold her for running off into the night against my suggestion, considering that I’d taken part in her little looting run on the caravan, guiding her along. Still, I made a mental note to try to talk to her at some point about managing our risks better.

With nothing better to do, I set about on furthering my construction projects around the dungeon for a while. Busy work to count down the hours until spring, however many there might still be. I had some ideas on making a borehole down to sea level, then adding a tunnel connecting it to the ocean. If I did that, I’d have access to salt water, as well as potentially being able to expand further for aquatic employees down the line. Digging was easy, mindless work, the mental equivalent of a light jog on a treadmill.

A good way to distract myself from overthinking about what might lie in store for the man we’d left on the wagons.

It took about two hours to make the borehole, as well as a hallway attaching it to the rest of the dungeon. It was a sheer drop, a pit with perfectly-smooth walls plummeting down, down into blackness below. Just to be careful, I covered it with a stone grate temporarily.

If dungeon-OSHA existed, I wasn’t about to risk getting on their bad side.

Connecting it to the sea from there was fairly easy, though I recognized that I might have to move the drainage pipe to our water systems elsewhere eventually, if we expanded further.

This connection would be invisible to anyone above water with how rough the seas were at the jagged-rocked bottom of the cliffs, and the foamy seas quickly filled this new space.

Ultimately, my main goal with this would be to bring the water up here and deliver it to our boiler room somehow. If we could do that, then we’d even have access to salt.

It seemed like a good idea to harvest it, even if just at a small scale. Humans loved the stuff back on Earth, and it had countless uses from preserving meats to seasoning meals. While I doubted that my companions would enjoy the extreme amount of salt required to save a store of food for an entire winter, it could come in handy in a pinch. Certainly not as a staple food, though; I doubted it was healthy for them to take in so much of it.

Assuming that this world’s civilizations didn’t just have a way to magically summon salt from thin air, it ought to sell for something, at least.

For now, I set the borehole aside as something to finish later. I’d need some time to figure out how to bring water all the way up to our level high above the sea. A chain pump seemed like a good choice, but I only had a low-level understanding of how they worked. It would certainly take a bit of trial and error to make something useable.

Libra had awoken by the time I’d finished up with my borehole project, stretching sleepily as she teetered her way down the hall from the living quarters to the now-covered greenhouse dome. She was a creature of routine; barely even half-awake, she made her way to the center of our farmlands and set about her first task of the day, re-igniting the fireball-like spell that would sustain our crops. It was simple enough for her at this point, the practice of doing this twice a day turning a once-difficult task into something that required only a single strand of her focus.

With that done, she took a seat on the stone pathway, stretching and yawning as if she was only truly waking up at this very moment. She glanced from one hallway to the other, ears twitching and flicking as she switched between them.

“…Where’s the mouse?”, she asked, her groggy eyes fighting to stay open.

Ah, right. She’d slept through last night’s events.

“Ephi’s sleeping, and probably will be for a while more. We ended up having a surprise mission for her to take care of last night. A caravan was passing along the road. She managed to sneak in and find a map for us.”

The fox yawned again, nodding along.

“I did not know that we did surprise missions,” she remarked.

“We usually don’t. That’s what made it a surprise,” I explained, multi-tasking with clearing ice buildup from our water intake pipes while chatting, “Hey, do you have anything planned for the day?”

She cocked her head far to the side. “Unless you have already made plans for me, I do not have plans for today,” she remarked, her tone somewhere in the no-man’s-land between confusion and dry sarcasm.

“Perfect. Last night got me thinking a little bit. We’re on our own out here, and we’re not exactly in the best position. Our part of the world is… well, small, in a sense. I can take every precaution to try and keep us hidden and safe, but I think it’s an inevitability that someone will stumble across this place eventually. The humans have an advantage over us in that they’re mobile, and they outnumber us significantly. The other core that we know of seems to be far better established as well—if things ever came down to a straight up battle between our sides, I don’t think we’d be able to offer much resistance. We need to play to our strengths, sure, but that doesn’t mean we can just ignore our weaknesses.”

Libra took a few moments to digest this information, strolling through the fields we’d all worked to cultivate. “I see. You are telling me this for a reason, yes?”

“Yep. Simply put, I think I’m going to be expanding our operations a bit and updating your job descriptions. ‘Loss prevention’, we’ll call it. Or maybe ‘victory assurance’. We’re not going to go out looking to pick fights or anything, but I think it makes sense for us to invest a bit into our ability to defend ourselves,” I explained, remembering the various threats we’d run into in the surrounding lands. The wildlife, the adventurers, the monsters from the other core—if we survived the struggles that nature threw at us only to lose to another threat, what was the point?

We’d never been true pacifists, only choosing to avoid conflict when possible. As far as I was concerned, “Survive” was our business statement. If a threat showed up at our doorstep, what would I be able to do? Ask them to politely hold still while I built a trap beneath their feet? No, we needed an active defense of some kind, even if only a token one to make our other defenses work.

Two employees certainly wasn’t ideal for an endeavor like that, but our resources already felt spread thin even with just Libra and Ephi. Once spring came, I’d look into expanding our roster. Maybe sooner if a lucky opportunity arose. For now, we’d all have to wear many hats in this organization.

“So you would like us to be guards? I suppose it makes sense for us to be expected to protect our den,” she muttered, “If we would be fighters, then I have a proposition.”

“Oh?”, I remarked, a bit surprised that she was jumping on board with her own suggestion right off of the bat, “What’s your pitch?”

She hardly waited for me to finish. “Primal ascension—the one that you spoke of with Cheshire. I would like to do it first. Before you give it to the mouse.”

All of my attention turned inwards into the greenhouse, abandoning the side jobs I was working on. My mana was nearly full from the past few days, but there was so much to consider before making that leap.

“And why do you want that?”

The fox grinned, staring up at the slowly-spinning sun hanging down below our ceiling.

“You can’t afford to change her yet. Her ability to hide, to sneak. You rely on it. If she changes, you may lose it. So, it only makes sense to give this gift to me, right? I'll be a better fighter, and you'll be better defended. A win-win.”

CURRENT PROGRESS:

BOSS

FRAGMENT OF COALESCED WILL LVL: 4 NAME: "Boss"

Traits:

Skills:

[Horticulture I]

[Biology I]

[Creator's Insight]

[Mech. Engineering II]

[Textiles I]

[Transmutation I]

[Mining I]

[Core Metalworking]

[Eidetic Blueprinting]

Features:

[Manamite Creation]

[Self-Synthesis]

[Manamite Specialization I]

[Material Infusion]

HP: 18 / 18 CATEGORY: Elemental MP: 87 / 100 SPECIES: Dungeon Core MP Rate: +27 daily SIZE: Tiny WEALTH: 6 XP: 19% STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 0 6 0 10 9 8

Nascent heart of a world-born entity, crystallized from soul energy. Exerts control over a localized area.

Manamite Horde (155 / 177):

145 Manamites

1 Managermites (-3 MP/d)

Boiler Squad (5 / 20):

5 Manamites

Memorymites (3)

Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

Level: 5

Wealth: 25

Employees: 3

Cost: 100 MP

Facility: Prison Virtual Hoard:

[COMMON MATERIALS]

➤1017.4 Raw Stone

➤418.0 Loose Soil

➤65.1 Biological Material

➤251.1 Raw Lumber

➤24.3 Plant Fiber

➤0.0 Raw Crystal

➤12.4 Iron Ore

➤30.9 Copper Ore

[RARE MATERIALS]

➤6.1 Moonstone

➤0.5 Shimmerwood

➤4 Stellarite

➤2.2 Orichalcum

EPHILIA

CORE-TOUCHED DIRE MOUSE (RUNT) LVL: 4+ NAME: "Ephilia"

Level Up Pending!

Traits:

[Forged Sapience]

[Gigantism]

Skills:

[Scavenge]

[Festering Bite]

[Core Link II]

[Core Bond I]

[Enhanced Vitality I]

[Enhanced Strength I]

[Athletics I]

[Self-Catalyzation]

[Life Magic I]

Spells:

[Rapid Bloom I]

Equipped:

🞚 Moonlit Mouseknight Barding

HP: 12 / 12 CATEGORY: Employee MP: 0 / 0 SPECIES: Field Mouse SP: 5 / 5 SIZE: Small XP: 100% GENDER: ♀ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 5 (+1) 6 (+1) 5 5 3 7

A field rodent of unusual size under the auric influence of a dungeon core. Possesses enhanced mental acuity and judgement. Force Level-Up Cost: 30 MP Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

PRIMAL ASCENSION

Cost: 100 MP

LIBRA

CORE-TOUCHED FOX KIT LVL: 3 NAME: "Libra"

Traits:

[Forged Sapience]

[Mana Processing]

Skills:

[Core Link I]

[Core Bond I]

[Stealth I]

[Evasion I]

[Self-Catalyzation]

[Light Magic I]

Spells:

[Sunlight Orb II]

Equipped:

🞚 Moonlit Silver Opal Ring-Amulet

HP: 9 / 9 CATEGORY: Employee MP: 2 / 2 SPECIES: Fox SP: 5 / 5 SIZE: Small XP: 38% GENDER: ♀ STR VIT DEX INT WIS PER 3 3 5 6 (+1) 4 7

A common red fox imbued with the auric touch of a dungeon core. A cunning and playful beast that's known for causing mischief. Force Level-Up Cost: 30 MP Criteria for Next Ascension Tier:

PRIMAL ASCENSION

Cost: 100 MP