The text had flickered right after she looked at the card again, directing her to give it to one of the locusts before they left for the next floor. It said that they had something to show her and her alone.

She needn’t get the Caster’s attention as he instantly turned to face her when she approached, looking up at her, then down at the card in her hand, then back up at her.

Black and beady though his eyes were, she could still see his expression grow wide-eyed, his mouth gaping a little with a subtle creeping smile hidden amidst the myriad tiny plates.

He snatched the card from her fingers without her needing to say so much as a single word, bringing it up within inches of his face and reading it with utmost undivided attention. Once, twice, thrice over he read the card before he let his hand down and looked at her again, his face plastered with barely-concealed excitement.

“It appears Delta has decided you deserve more explanation than he had time to give you in regards to self-cultivation,” the Caster said, turning and beckoning her to follow him as he walked towards the projection altar.

Zel looked back at the others, chiefly at Zefaris. The markswoman had sat down a little distance from Strolvath, busying herself with cleaning her bayonet to a painstakingly thorough degree. She looked at her with a mix of curiosity, confusion, and concern.

“I’ll be back in a bit, Delta wants them to show me something,” Zel explained as she walked by.

It prompted a slow nod and a half-whispered, “I’m not going to the next floor without you.”

Zel gave a nod back, then briskly caught up to the Caster as he outright stepped onto the projection altar. When they both stood atop it, he raised his staff high into the air and brought it down onto the projection glyph’s center. In the moment before he brought it down, Zelsys just barely managed to make out a branching, key-like protrusion coming out the bottom of the staff.

It sunk into the stone a forearm’s length, at which point the Caster turned it clockwise with a jerky motion. Portions of the glyph lit up in a pattern that spread from the staff and wisps of Fog rose from them. At first it looked random, but soon the glyph-within-a-glyph became familiar.

Indeed, Zelsys recognized the shape of a Fog Gate glyph only a split-second before the ground gave beneath her feet and she fell through the newly-opened Gate alongside the Caster.

They emerged from a Gate situated on a ceiling, finding themselves momentarily suspended in mid-air as if they'd been stripped of all momentum in transit. A fraction of a second later, they dropped about half a meter’s worth to the floor. The Caster raised a hand and snapped his fingers, causing the floor to sink and revealing that it was, in fact, some type of elevator. Zel saw that somehow, he had retained his staff. Three of the four walls had lightgems at regular intervals, though they glowed a dim blue rather than the usual stark white.

“Alright, we’re alone. Now explain,” she said, dusting herself off despite the absence of dust in the Dungeon.

“There is no more to explain than I already have,” the bugman replied giddily, walking up to the wall without lightgems. “It will be better to show you. I wager that soon you will have more answers than I do.”

After a little while riding the elevator, it arrived at a spacious hallway with a domed ceiling, lit by the very same dim-blue lightgems as the elevator. It differed from all others in that there were no floor panels, no glowing lines, not even the slightest seam intermediate chamber. The whole thing was a single long, solid hallway that stretched onward for dozens of meters to an apparent dead end.

Tok. Tok. Tok. His staff echoed through the hall as they walked.

Zelsys felt a tangible pressure bearing down on her, as if she were passing through barrier after barrier the closer she approached the dead-end. Meanwhile, the Caster seemed utterly unperturbed, ambling onward at an ever-casual pace.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

There was no sound besides that of their footsteps and that clacking staff, not even the usual distant sound of the cogworks.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

The intangible resistance grew until she felt the need to begin Fog-breathing. A deep breath in and a slow exhalation, just enough to take the next step.

When she first exhaled, the thread of Fog flew towards the dead-end as if snatched up by an unseen hand. It clung to the wall, sinking into it as a silvery inlay. Another step, another breath.

Step by step, breath by breath, she watched a glyph being drawn on the wall by her own exhalation, covering the surface utterly by the time they reached it. In its center was the sole continuous empty space, its shape perfectly mirroring that of her right hand.

The Caster needn’t beckon her to place her hand into the outline. When she did the wall split, shuddered and slid downward, revealing a chamber beyond.

Stepping past the precipice, she entered the chamber and saw that it had seven walls, with seven seven-sided pillars in each corner that were connected at the top by seven arches that merged together in the center.

Embedded halfway in the the perfect center of each of the chamber’s walls was a black quartz sphere, half a meter beneath which sat a dim-blue lightgem.

Most importantly, in the center of the chamber were four concentric glyph-etched rings surrounding a circle a little larger than a meter across, and in the circle there was a subtle impression that immediately made Zelsys think a great many people had to have sat here, hundreds or thousands perhaps. That, or the circle was designed that way to subtly guide people to sit in it.

The four concentric rings on the ground came alive with bright light, projecting an image of all four rings rising into the air above it. The outermost ring rose only about Zel’s waist height, the second outermost one to her exact eye height, the third one nearly a meter above her head, and the fourth rocketed to over twice her height above the ground, nearly reaching the ceiling.