At first glance, the entrance seemed completely blocked by rubble. However, it only took Reece a second to realize that he needed to move a few fallen rocks and a couple of bricks out of his way before he could breach the opening. The thick metal door was outward-opening and after some trial and error, Reece determined it wasn’t locked but was rusted in place. It obviously hadn’t been maintained in years if not decades. A few spots remained where the grey paint still held on, but most of the door was streaked in brown and yellow rust. A simple command to the nightmarish horse and the thing kicked the door with its hind hooves, buckling the door and causing it to crash against the inside wall, one of its rusty hinges managing to hold through the assault.

Reece was finding the new mount extremely useful and just before he was about to enter, he had a thought. Turning, he put a mental command into the horse’s mind, ‘guard’. Mirthfully, he wondered what everyone would say if he brought the nightmarish creature back with him. While humorous, the thought of it made Reece realize how impossible that scenario would be. Half the folks on the carrier would probably swoon from fright at the mere sight of the undead science experiment.

Chuckling darkly to himself, he passed the bent metal door and did a cursory examination of its moorings. It was obvious that the door had been retrofitted into the space and that the original door was long gone. Making a mental note, Reece left the broken door and walked into the inner workings of the great wall of China. He was greeted with a brick wall about two meters in. The passage jutted off to the right about three meters before jutting back to the left and farther into the interior of the great wall. While he moved through the passage and around the corner, it wasn’t long before the dim light from outside failed him completely.

Reaching into one of his many seemingly bottomless pockets, Reece withdrew a headlamp. Shortly after receiving the amazing outfit, he made sure to stock it with anything and everything he could think that he may need. After several days, he’d finally found a use for one of the many items within. He couldn’t believe how quickly things had progressed since his encounter with the goddess Inanna.

Placing the stretchy black band around his head, he flicked the small switch next to the circular lamp affixed to the sturdy band. The battery-powered light flickered on, brighter than he had expected. It provided ample illumination in the darkened area, making the search he was about to undertake much easier. The room he was in was roughly square at about three meters by three meters. The ceiling was low, only two meters or so high. Reece just barely fit beneath it without needing to duck.

A couple of wall sconces were the only decor in the room. Heavily covered in rust, they were light sources of a bygone era. Below each of the sconces, there were small piles of rotted wood, evidence of the torches that once had provided the room with a flaming illumination. A faint darkening of the ceiling above the sconces could only be the stain of ancient soot, another tell-tale sign of the torches that once burned there. Over the decades, loose rubble had coated the floor and had piled up in two of the corners, crumbling from the walls and ceiling as the stone structure aged. Directly across from the long-abandoned passage he had entered through was another equally neglected passage leading farther into the wall.

With the headlamp lighting the way, Reece started to explore the area. He was careful to avoid stepping on the larger chunks of stone and cement that littered the worn brick floor. However, even with the headlamp’s illumination, the hiding spot for the fragment wouldn’t be easy to find. The secret chamber would have been hidden away under the great wall for hundreds if not thousands of years, and no one had discovered it. From what Reece could remember, the great wall had been constructed during the enlightenment ages, around the middle of the last epoch, although he recalled that parts of it dated much farther back than that. Based on that limited insight, he couldn’t figure whether the fragment had been hidden in the wall while it was still being built or sometime after. Instead, he decided it was time to commune with his secret weapon.

“Hey Chippo,” said Reece, breaking up the silence of the place. “Can you guide me to the nightcore piece?”

“Sure, sure,” answered Chippo, repeating himself as usual. “Hmmm, lessee... ah, kay, kay. So, you need to go through the passage into the next room and take the stairway on the right down to the bottom level. Now, go, go! Ask me again when you get there.”

Taking the ghostly voice of the Furdian at his word, Reece headed towards the opening at the far end of the room. Sure enough, it opened into another room much like the one he had just left. The only difference was that this room had a brick-covered staircase leading down into the subterranean portion of the wall. He did a quick measurement of the first step, twenty centimeters exactly. Counting them as he descended the long and winding staircase, he came up with one hundred and twenty-six steps by the time the staircase ended. He had passed several landing areas that seemed set up for storage, which made sense for a structure constructed to withstand a long siege. At the bottom of the stairs was a circular room about four meters in diameter. It was quite cold and looked like it had once been a cellar for storing provisions.

Within the room, Reece noticed six sconces on the circular wall, evenly spaced. They still held the remnants of torches, somewhat better preserved than the ones up above as they were still loosely resting within the metal bands that had been designed to hold them. Oddly, only two of the sconces showed any soot marked above them, almost like the other four torches had never been used. It made sense since two torches would have been sufficient to illuminate the small room. So, why six torches then? Taking note of that oddity, Reece examined the floor of the room. It too was littered with rubble but added to that were the remains of several crates and a few moldy piles of rags and what appeared to be dirt which filled the outskirts of the round room.

There was one thing out of place, however. In the center of the room, a circular stone was inlaid amongst the plain bricks that made up the rest of the floor. It immediately reminded him of the circular stone he had stood on near the red pyramid in Egypt. If Reece was a gambling man, he’d bet it all on that stone being his way into the secret chamber here under the wall. This time, however, he was alone and there weren’t any pedestals about for the twins to activate. No, this puzzle had to be different. That was okay, he knew what he had to do.

“Chippo,” he called out to the empty room, though he knew the Furdian could still hear him. “I’m at the base of the stairs. Now what?”

“Okay okay,” chirped the Furdian, his already high-pitched voice going up another octave. “Let’s see...hmmm... yes, yes... okay... hmm... alright, alright.”

“Yes?” pressed Reece, wondering what Chippo was going on about.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” sighed Chippo.

“Ugh, fine, what’s the good news?” asked Reece, needing a pick-me-up before hearing the bad news.

“Well, well... the good news first, yes? I’ve located the fragment,” answered Chippo. “It’s about a hundred meters almost straight down.”

“Okay, that’s great,” replied Reece. “That means we are almost certainly in the right spot. So, what’s the bad news?”

“Well,” began Chippo tentatively. “I have absolutely no idea how you’re supposed to get down there. That part’s up to you.”

“Well, shit,” muttered Reece. “Thanks for trying. I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

“How’s that?” asked the curious Furdian.

“Trial and error,” answered Reece. “I need to systematically go through everything in this room until something shakes loose.”

“Good, good,” replied Chippo. “Smart, smart Reece will find the way. Yes yes.”

Reece wasn’t sure if the Furdian’s ghost was that confident in him, or just glad to be free of the seemingly impossible task at hand. Regardless, Chippo remained silent while Reece began the painstaking process of searching the room. He pulled a flat shovel out of his pocket, chuckling at the fact that he was now using a second item from his outfit of useful things. He quickly put it to good use, clearing a quarter of the floor of debris. Meticulously moving the various chunks of rock, cement, wood, rags, dirt, and other unidentifiable detritus, he was amazed at how much of it broke down just from being disturbed. When he was finished, he had a cleared area of brick floor with a mound of mostly uniform dirt built up against the wall.

Finding nothing of note there, he continued around the room, cleaning a quarter of it at a time. By the time he was finished, he had three-quarters of the room cleared and a large pile of dry dirt in the other quarter. There was nothing left on the floor but the dirt pile. That only left three other options in the room. The stairway, the brick walls and ceiling, and the sconces. He thought the sconces seemed like they held the best odds of yielding positive results, so he started with them.

Figuring the answer most likely lay with one of the four sconces that clearly hadn’t been used for illuminating the room, he began inspecting the nearest one. The moment he touched it, the remains of the torch that it had possibly carried for centuries broke up and fell to the brick floor below. He grabbed onto the sconce and tried twisting it. Surprisingly, it turned. Looking closely, Reece noticed that the sconce was affixed to the wall by a single bar that penetrated deep into the stone. It didn’t take him long before he was able to spin it completely around. He went to the other sconces and found the same to be true. He was even able to spin the two sconces that had obviously been used.

The excitement of the discovery soon wore off as he didn’t understand the puzzle. Maybe each one had to be placed at a certain angle, but how was he going to determine that? He did another close examination of the room, but if there had ever been clues, time had eroded any trace of them from existence. The only thing of note that he found was a series of depressions that surrounded the circular stone. Still, he truly believed that the architects of these secret chambers would have known that it could be centuries before someone came for the fragments. He just knew that the answer had to be here somewhere. Looking closer at one of the depressions, he gently blew into it. A burst of dust billowed up, forcing Reece to back away and cover his mouth and nose.

Tying a bandana around his face as he waited for the dust to settle, he examined the hole again. It was much deeper than he had first assumed. The other thing that he noticed immediately was that it appeared to be roughly the same circumference as the holes that the torches were set into. Grabbing the nearest torch, instead of twisting, he pulled. At first, it didn’t give, but after a few twists, he was able to pull it free of the wall. The part of the sconce that had been sunk into the wall was an iron pole, about twenty-five centimeters long. Taking it over to the deep depression near the round stone, he forced it inside. It took a bit of effort, but he was able to press the sconce to the floor, at which point he heard a distinctive metallic click echo from all around him. He was onto something.

The first thing he did was clear the depressions. Two had bits of rubble jammed into them but Reece was able to use a pair of long needle-nose pliers to pull the ruble free and clear the holes. While working the rubble loose, Reece noticed that the holes were lined with metal and had slits running along the sides. He also noticed the loose dirt, sand, and dust all poured out of the metal-sleeved holes through those slits. Reece nodded in respect at the clever bit of ancient engineering. Once all the holes were cleared, Reece got to work on the sconces.

The first couple went quickly, each ending in a click once it was placed within one of the holes. The task slowed down after that, however. It took the better part of an hour, but he finally managed to remove the last of the six sconces from the wall. He had skipped over it when he couldn’t get it to pull loose. With the last sconce in hand, he stepped onto the circular stone and began the arduous process of forcing the sconce’s pole into the last of the depressions. Another click, this being the sixth, and he had just enough time to stand back up before the stone slab rumbled beneath him and fell away into the bowels of the earth, far below the great wall. Having been through this once before only slightly helped reduce the terror of falling into a deep dark hole in the ground at near terminal velocity before the stone slab began to grind to a halt and arrest his free-fall.

He laughed aloud when he saw the same phosphorescent veins of material crisscrossing the rough-hewn rock walls of the cavern to which he had been delivered. There were no more puzzles within, or at least Reece hoped not. Before him sat a large pedestal with the familiar white marble bowl resting atop it. Sixteen statues sat spaced around the room. They all depicted a strange four-legged beast, resembling a dog, but bigger and thicker. They had faces that looked more like those of great cats and most sported a pair of curved horns or antlers on its head. Within each of the creature’s mouths, they held an egg-like item. Each egg had a unique marking on it. Reece already had a good idea of how this probably worked. Now he just had to figure out which three egg-shaped items were needed to free whichever god or goddess was trapped here with the nightcore fragment.