In front of me was at least one chance to meet a human. But I suspected, that even if life could be preserved in ice through magic, the surrounding extreme cold was still deadly. Therefore, I reined in the urge to crack open the ice columns, and carefully observed the surroundings.

I found nothing of interest except a load of tools like picks and rope lying between the ice-encased people. What drew my attention to these rather ordinary tools were the materials and the workmanship. Pick heads were made of an odd metal or alloy which resembled the bronze in colour, but the mirror-smooth surface had reddish and green glints when viewed from an angle. The handles looked simple, but were expertly crafted from pure white smooth wood. Even the rope, carelessly left aside, was braided from extremely thin fibres and retained the flexibility and strength even in these extreme conditions.

The identity of the people locked in ice was getting more and more mysterious. Why did they have the ice covering them, while the corpses I had seen before were simply frozen? And these picks and rope were not something that looked ordinary either.

---

Deciding to return there later, I took a bundle of rope with me and entered the hallway that led on.

That hallway was straight, had no side passages and was steadily going downwards. I passed three more zones of agglomerated ice, until I finally felt the air heating up. The walls were covered in frozen drops of moisture, and thin crystals of ice and snow were fluttering in the air currents. The thick white fog was rolling on the floor, covering everything below my knees. Were those frozen atmospheric gases melting together with water? I had no way to tell.

I had reached the area, where in the absence of the Beating Iceheart the warmth from the outside had started to seep into this frozen world. It had still long way to go, with the huge masses of stone and a web of narrow passages working as a giant freezer. If my guess was correct, and the Beating Iceheart had absorbed all of the heat in the surroundings, then it might take years for the temperature to return to habitable level back from around the minus 270 degrees of Celsius. I doubted the temperature had reached the true absolute zero at minus 273 point 15 degrees of Celsius or exact 0 on Kelvin scale, because it would have entailed problems at quantum level and created vacuum, but it must have been close. I seems, I had become a real trivia king thanks to the completely perfect memory.

Getting rid of unnecessary thoughts about thermal physics, I increased my pace. Soon, the rise in temperature became more and more evident, with rivulets of water running down the walls and floor. Water flowed onwards alongside me, hopefully towards the exit.

---

And soon, I finally reached the huge, square-shaped exit. I stopped as I passed the doorway.

The sun was unfamiliar, at least twice bigger than I was used to, and red. The sky looked dark, and I could even see a few stars faintly shining alongside the sun.

A dozen or so slightly too high and deep steps led down into the jungle, and water from the hallway flowed down there. The trees in front were looking rather thin and sickly, but further ahead the vegetation was getting much taller, thicker and lusher. Possibly the cold seeping from the inside had hampered the growth of the plants near the exit. The cold had also likely prevented the plants from blocking the passage or actually burying the structure. Or there could be some sort of herbicide protecting the structure. Or yeah, magic. I had to take into account that any possibility might have supernatural form.

---

I turned around to look at the building where I had spent an unknown period of time. And felt my jaw drop.

The structure was not simply huge. It was monumental, colossal, mind-blowing epic and gargantuan. It was difficult to even find an adjective that could describe the sheer enormity of the step pyramid I could see.

I previously guessed the building to have some magic or scientific means to create the large internal space while maintaining adequate size outside. But as it turned out, it was simply built like that in the ordinary three-dimensional space. The outside surface was made of the same grey smooth basalt-like stone as the inside of the pyramid, with no decorations or artwork visible. The exit was a structure protruding from the pyramid, and looked like a lonely ledge near the foot of the mountain cliff.

With my enhanced vision I could see it going sideways for kilometers, but due to the lack of a proper viewing angle, I could not even see the end of the pyramid. Above, the slowly narrowing terraces were still extremely wide before they penetrated the clouds. If I remembered correctly from geography classes back in school, those clouds were something called altostratus. And if this world had similar physics and laws of nature, that would place them at the height of over two and half kilometers.

The sheer height of the pyramid made me question the physics of the world. On Earth, a pyramidal structure made of stone blocks would collapse under its own weight long before reaching even a kilometer. “Magic. Must be it.”, I grumbled as I experienced mental vertigo from looking at such a monument, as the mind refused to accept such a giant structure as an artificial one.

The pyramid’s faces were formed from uniform-looking steps around five meters high and deep. From the exit downwards led a stretch of smaller, but still unnaturally high and deep steps. I could not be sure about other sides of the pyramid, but perhaps there was some stairway or a ramp for proper access to the top like ziggurats used to have. I could not imagine climbing that pyramid up those huge steps in another way. Unless it had some religious or ritualistic significance, that is. People tend to do crazy things for their beliefs. I shuddered, remembering some practices of the civilizations that used to build pyramids on Earth.

---

I looked around to ensure that there were no signs of activity by intelligent beings. Not being met by bloodthirsty, sacrifice-demanding tribes or hordes of idling tourists making selfies at that particular site of local heritage (if given a choice, I was not fully sure which option I would have preferred) was one of the greater joys in my situation.

Actually, I could not see or hear even a bird, which was odd. A silent jungle sounded like an oxymoron for any person familiar with nature or at least Animal Planet programs. But well, there was that huge step pyramid looming over that part of the forest - who knows what kind of vibe it gave off to the animals with their sharp instincts.

I decided that nothing will come by and steal my stuff, so I dropped my belongings on the stairs and headed back into the pyramid.

It was time to check out the people frozen into ice.