Drip.

Dry, rocky tunnels. Mountainous caves with stalactites hanging like swords from above. Unending passages dimly lit by moss. Underground forests spawned from the roots of trees complex enough to challenge his very imagination. He’d seen a wide variety of landscapes while traversing this seemingly endless anomaly.

But never had he come across a place like this.

Drip.

Gone were the moss-lined walls. Gone were the dead, decaying caverns with slimes and fang-worms peeping out of damp crevices. Gone was the dense vegetation covered in the inky darkness of the shadows. All he could feel now from this tunnel was a bone-chilling eeriness, almost as if someone had transplanted it from a different location and hid it deep within this monster-laden anomaly.

And it was huge.

For a subterranean chamber, it was surprisingly well-lit. The walls had some sort of crystal outgrowth on them—glimmering clusters of pale silver with a kind of luminescence that made him feel more than slightly wary. No single patch provided adequate lighting for the entire place, but as a whole, they filled the cavern with an ashen white light.

And that wasn’t even considering the angry, vengeful feeling that permeated the air around him. It made him feel observed. Like something—or someone—was watching his every move.

It made him feel vulnerable.

Stop behaving like prey, Lukas chided himself.

Drip.

And what was that strange dripping noise? Lukas glanced around, but nothing remotely resembling a pond was in sight. Instead, there was a metallic sheen to the floor, as branches of silver split off from a large metallic circle in the center, traversing all the way through the blackness at the end of the tunnel.

For a moment, Lukas wondered if he had stepped into some antiquated ritual chamber.

“…what is this place?” he heard Tanya mutter.

He didn’t know, but he sort of did? It was complicated. Sharing an awareness with the crypt left him in a bizarre state. There was this weird feeling of familiarity in his stomach, as if every single rock and crystal had been personally put into place by his own hands.

He had been here before, and had walked this floor.

“Step closer to the walls.”

Lukas found his gaze drawn to the long, tapering crystals that lined the walls. Some of them grew in clusters like thick bushes, while others elongated to several feet, only to merge with others to create a scaly meshwork. He squinted his eyes, trying to see what was within the crystals, but he could discern nothing more than hazy blurs.

Analyze.

FEATHERGLASS

Crystal Outgrowth. Indicative of Stored information

Almost instinctively, he touched the crystal closest to him. The moment his finger made contact, it exploded into a billion motes of silver, literally sandblasting against his entire front, before he could so much as cross his arms.

SOUL SIPHON Success!

Absorbed Monster Prototype KIRIN

Thus far, Lukas had seen some fairly unconventional, unbelievable things. But sooner or later, everything had fit into a new pattern of sorts, with its own equations and rules. Environments had their own patterns too. But this was different. There were memories in the surrounding crystals. And not just memories, but soul architecture storage literally growing on the walls of the cavern.

This was a new level of weird.

A deep, primal hunger began to gnaw in his stomach pit. He instinctively knew what this place was.

It was the crypt’s data bank.

Shattering a single crystal had given him a new monster prototype. Lukas looked at the long tunnel in front of him and swallowed. It was lined with maybe tens of thousands of such crystal mounds.

“Featherglass!” Tanya spoke up excitedly. “Finally!”

“You mean that metal Zuken mentioned?” Elena demanded.

Tanya nodded , staring at the bushy outgrowth all across the chamber. “We just need to find the ones that don’t shatter on touch. Empty crystals.”

“So the memories make them fragile?” Lukas asked.

“Yes. They’re generally single-use items,” Tanya explained. “The more saturated they are, the closer they get to breaking point. Even the slightest touch of another organism can shatter them.”

Drip.

“Impossible!” grunted Zuken as he stepped closer. Lukas wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he looked like he was manipulating mana around one of the crystals. He paused, studying the effects before spinning around and choosing another random crystal, and repeated the same. His eyes widened. This time he chose a third crystal and repeated the same thing almost angrily.

Then he stepped back, his face ashen.

“What is it?” Olfric asked, concerned.

Zuken was visibly shocked. “Well, this is definitely featherglass. Though the sheer amount here is…extraordinary.”

Lukas’s eyes narrowed. “But that isn’t what disturbs you, is it?”

“I’m a terramancer. Identification of pure metals and stones is part of it, so I know featherglass is usually rated about 62% pure. Any more and it starts to evaporate. Most commercially available featherglass is usually an alloy of equal parts featherglass and bapranor. If you’re willing to spend a fortune, featherglass that is 69% pure can be obtained. I know for a fact that the emperor’s crown is made of croisium and featherglass that’s 76% pure, and rumor is that the Goddess herself helped in the purification process. Any refinement beyond that is known to be impossible.”

All five of them glanced at the crystals around them.

“So how pure is this?” Elena asked conversationally.

“That’s the thing. My spell can only check it till 76%, and it took me a minor fortune just to learn the spell. This is way beyond that.”

“How much is it worth?” Olfric asked.

Zuken laughed hysterically. “So much that it’s effectively worthless! There aren’t enough mezals in the entire Llaisy Kingdom to pay for the amount we have here. And if this anomaly can grow featherglass—”

“It’s priceless,” Lukas finished.

“We’re supposed to destroy this place,” Elena pointed out.

Lukas frowned. These crystals were supposed to store memories, but they were storing soul architecture. Perhaps this higher level of purity had something to do with that?

Drip.

This time something wet fell on top of him from above. As he shrugged it off, another drop fell, this time in the open palm of his head.

Drip.

One drop became two. And it wasn’t water.

Drip—

It was black, shiny, and separated into tiny globules upon the moment of contact. And despite the constant dripping, he didn’t feel the slightest sensation of wetness, though it did burn slightly. He looked down at the black floor around him. A floor that exuded a metallic sheen. A floor where he could see ripples—almost like he was standing on frozen water.

Drip.

“Is this—” Lukas peered at it, rubbing the liquid substance against his fingers. “Is this mercury?”

He stared up in incredulity. More drops of the liquid metal began to fall onto his face, sliding down his cheeks and dripping onto the cavern floor, where the fallen mercury slowly pooled into the strange metallic…pavements?

The whole thing had a strangely esoteric feel to it.

“It has been aeons since I last saw this. Aqāru.”

Is that what you called mercury back in your time?

“Not the base metal. This is aqāru. Metal made sentient.”

He turned around and found his associates inspecting the featherglass shards. Several of them shattered upon contact, the motes of silver falling down into the floor and dissolving into the liquid pool.

“Fools enthralled with silly materialism. The real treasure is in your hands.”

Lukas didn’t quite believe her. It was a crystal that could store memory. Souls, even. Could such a thing truly be considered worthless? “Sentient, huh?” He rubbed his fingers over the mercury. It was a strange concept—sentient metal. “Can you dumb it down for me?”

He heard her let out an exaggerated sigh of resignation. Just like she always did when he said something irritating, foolish, or just plain dumb. Which, apparently, was all the time.

“You recall the Origin, yes?”

I do.

“Think of the universe akin to a pendulum, swaying between two opposing extremes. On one end is the Formless Infinity, a state of undifferentiated unity, the one and only absolute. The other end is the Infinity of Forms, the fully developed cosmos, life and anti-life, matter and its opposite. Nothing that has form is unchanging. It is always relative. This path between Formless Infinity and the Infinity of Forms is called Creation.”

With this logic, the Origin would fit right into Planck’s epoch theory. A state right after and closest to the Formless Infinity, but not quite it.

“The Origin possesses all possible qualities and attributes, while every being in this universe possesses a limited number of qualities and attributes. The self-identification of an entity with a set of attributes is what you call a soul prototype.”

Soul prototype. Consciousness. Anima. Atman. Vital Force. His memories threw up a bunch of facts from the religions he had studied on his grandpa’s lap. The Origin had a close parallel with the ancient Hindu concept of Brahman or the ten-dimensional Sephiroth of the Kabbalah.

“When you kill an entity—creature, monster or otherwise—you sunder the threads of its soul connecting it to its body. The soul returns to the World to be reforged into something else. But when you siphon it—”

Lukas understood. It was why the crypt had judged him as a thief, why it was attacking him with such prejudice. Killing the monsters would have been fine. But he was stealing.

What does that have to do with mercury?

“Aqāru,” she corrected him again. “In my day, aqāru was considered the ultimate metal because it’s the sole element that may be brought to life. It would be treated and upon its awakening, a powerful creature would be slain over it. The quality that makes aqāru so special, after all, is its ability to absorb spiritual existences into itself.”

Killing a creature would sunder the soul from the body. In this case, the soul would be captured by the aqāru and then—

What then?

“You would create a golem. One bearing the soul of the creature you sacrificed. It would hold the skills and instincts of the monster with the fluidity and strength of liquid metal. Such a creature is conventionally unkillable.”

Lukas froze. This was the reason Solana wanted him to destroy the crypt. There was no doubt she knew about this aqāru. Maybe she had even lost her soldiers to it. Soldiers that were consumed and saved in the data bank above.

The crypt wasn’t the main issue here. The aqāru was.

And that was why she needed him. Someone truly physical and un-possessed by her kind.

Everything was beginning to fall into place.

Tell me, Lukas asked, his mind racing at lightspeed, what other powers does this aqāru possess?

Inanna laughed. It was clear she knew what he was thinking. “Aqāru are superconductors of both mana and lifeforce. It is what made their golems so prized in an army. Add that to its effectiveness against wraiths…” She chortled. “My sister abhorred it.”

Then this aqāru should be useful for me, right?

“Most definitely.”

Then help me use it. Our bargain should cover this, right? I mean—

He paused. Something was happening. The floor—there were ripples on the floor.

“Mortal, be warned.”

The floor beneath his feet vanished.

But Lukas’s training paid off. On raw instinct, he slowed down his own momentum. He didn’t have time to craft a motion bubble around himself. One moment he was standing on firm terrain, and in the next, it vanished—or rather, it was pulled away in all directions with surprising speed—leaving a gaping hole through which all five of them fell. A quick employment of perceptual dilation told him that Zuken had already grabbed Elena and crafted a pedestal beneath their feet, Olfric stabbed the pedestal with his sword to stay perched, and Tanya slowly descended into the pit, a soft stream of wind entwined all around her.

The chamber below…was unlike any other. Tremendously huge, it had thin, cylindrical pillars of rock rising up from the ground to the ceiling above. Featherglass shards shone an iridescent blue from the top, giving a soft, eerie illumination to this realm of blackness.

Olfric pulled a canister from his bag.

The chamber was blinded with radiant white.

This was nothing like the caverns he had been in so far. Extending into the depths of the earth like a serpent’s tongue, the inner sanctuary of the anomaly was larger than some of the cathedrals he’d seen in his life. To a degree, it even resembled one. Lights played in soft colors on the walls, mostly shifting rosy hues. The cave was of living rock, and the walls had all been shaped by water into organic-looking curves and swirls. The floor was covered in aqāru running in exquisitely carved furrows to produce a pattern too sophisticated and perfect to be a mere coincidence. At the center, where the furrows formed a sink, an enormous bone-white stone jutted from the ground. And seated on top of it was—

Himself.

It was a perfect doppelganger crafted purely out of aqāru that constantly ebbed and flowed within him, rippling across his metallic form. The liquid metal had even crafted a fair approximation of his trousers and armor, adding uneven textures to his body. Two long, jagged daggers were stabbed into two legs of the chair.

“What. The. Fu—”

“Welcome, Lukas Aguilar.” His doppelganger smiled. “I have been waiting for you.”