While Zel tended towards a widely varied diet out of an inherent curiosity for flavors and her body’s ravenous demand for nutrition, Jorfr’s overwhelming preference for meat meant that most of his meal kits were dominated by big, hefty cuts or meat-adjacent foods, though Ozmir’s downright religious outlook on the culinary arts meant that they were nevertheless nutritionally complete as self-contained packages on the off-chance that he might not be able to eat more than once in a day. As they went round heating their respective meals and eating, Victor finished his elixir and tried to return to studying the scroll while he waited, only to emit a groan of rage and frustration after re-reading the same line five times and scribbling in his notebook. He grabbed his head in his hands and contorted his face into a grimace befitting his mental state before forcefully rolling the scroll back up and tossing it to Zelsys, regardless of the fact she was in the middle of eating. She caught the scroll in her free hand and turned her eyes up at the redhead, raising her eyebrows.

“I can’t fucking think! It just… I read the words, but I can’t uh… Process? Digest them?They slip from my head the moment I look away! I’ve only burned myself out like this by staying awake for days on end before.”

Swallowing a mouthful, Zel vocalized a realization: “Oh, right. Spiritual strain injuries screw with your mental function, I forgot. How’s the pain?”

“It’s fine, the elixir got rid of it. Now I’m just… Braindead and magicless for the next day or so, hopefully,” he sighed, retrieving a waterskin from storage to take a drink. He glanced at his notes and tried to re-read them, but after a hiss of pain and rubbing his temple, he admitted: “Okay, maybe several days.”

Zel considered giving him DDLV to see if it would help, but knowing that the formulation wouldn’t be safe for him to drink, she turned to Zef as she pulled the bottle out of storage, followed by another brass cup.

“...Do you remember the safe DDLV dilution ratio we settled on for the Batch 5?”

The blonde froze in the middle of running a cleaning rod through Pentacle’s barrel, looking up and squinting as she tried to remember. Then, she continued the chain by turning to Victor and questioning him: “What’s your Hardness rating?”

“Uh, D+,” he muttered through a mouthful of River Dozer noodles, curiously eyeing the seal-plastered bottle of blue liquid in Zel’s hand.

“One part DDLV to three parts water should be safe,” Zefaris advised, though the uncertainty in her voice made it clear that she was purposely underestimating. Nevertheless, Zel took the advice at face value and handed the thinned-out elixir to Victor. Upon taking a swig, he instantly commented: “Oh, this is Tengri’s Tears… Hold on, Newman Alchemicals is your company?”

Zel shrugged: “Eh, sort of. It’s just the in-sect branch of Riverside Remedies, for producing the stuff the civilian-facing company can’t because it would be too dangerous for civilians. They supply our apothecary, we share our facilities and legal exemptions. Wouldn’t work as easily as it does if I didn’t know the owner.”

A short time passed, and while eating Zel held the Itrian scroll up, muttering a question through a full mouth: “Which part d’you read?”

“Euuhh… It’s marked by a slip stamped with a weird lil’ creature in like, a cage,” he said, gesturing vaguely with a finger before he decided to just lift his notebook and show his copy of the symbol. The complex Itrian pictogram did, in fact, resemble a weird little creature in a cage. Fortunately, the lion’s share of the scroll incorporated mnemoglyphs, rather than demanding the reader to understand Itrian moonrunes.

“No wonder he can’t make sense of this shit with a spiritual strain injury, it’s hard to read even for me…” she thought. What was detailed within the scroll made sense, the problem was that it was written from a mystical perspective that assumed the reader to be an intermediate practitioner of Itrian spiritualism at the least. Despite the absence of purposeful obfuscation, it would still have to be decoded in a fashion; while Zel had absorbed vast volumes of learning on spiritualism in the last half-year both for her own cultivation and out of pure boredom, she felt herself ill-equipped for this task. Jorfr was more suited to making sense of it than her, and so she left the scroll for later. For now, the four of them just ate and rested.

“You sure you’re good to go on?” Zel asked Victor. It had been a couple hours, but the day was far from over, and the position of the sun wouldn’t mean anything underground regardless.

Stretching in place, the redhead answered: “Yeah, I can move fine, the elixir helped… I’ll just be useless in a fight.”

A wry grin formed on his face and he added: “You’ll have to fight at nine-tenths strength if it comes down to it.”

Returning a smile, Zel yanked him to his feet. They turned their eyes to the Mouth of Prasticaris and soon began the arduous process of descending into its depths.

Agartha.

Jorfr had called it that. This… Subterranean sprawl, this world beneath ours.

We were to use it as a passage to the North, to bypass the desolate nothingness of the ice sheets, wracked by blizzards and marauding beasts. Not merely predators, but unnatural things wrought for war by ancient empires, left to fend for themselves when their conquests became politically undesirable. The four of us traveled beyond the mountains in the north, traversing a whole other desolate, monster-riddled plain in order to reach the Mouth of Prasticaris. It was said to be an entryway into Agartha situated in the skeletal maw of a long-dead titan, supposedly blasted into solid rock by the self-same primordial force that had killed it.

There was no gate, staircase, or elevator. It was just a sinkhole, a gaping wound in the earth, at whose bottom we soon found ourselves.