Book 3, Chapter 60 (Patreon)

The safehouse on floor one was sparsely furnished and in what I supposed they probably thought of as a bad neighborhood. Everyone had an ignited core, at least everyone who walked within a few hundred feet of where I sat in an old chair with torn upholstery, hidden away from view. I couldn’t begin to guess what the average mana generation rates were for these people, but I was willing to bet none of them had anything close to a perfect ignition.

I didn’t see much in the way of magic, just instinctual invocations to give people energy. Food scarcity was the biggest problem in the Sanctum of Light, and the lower the floor, the harder it was to find something to eat. And yet each and every one of the people living in squalor here was utterly convinced that this was still a fate preferable to leaving the tower and living with the ‘dirt people.’

To be fair to them, even at the bottom level of the tower, there was still mana in the air. Having a subpar ignition wasn’t that much of a handicap when people could just process mana out of the environment around them. And since mana powered so much of their society, it made sense that the idea of leaving this place, even to just the lands around the tower that still had a little bit of ambient mana, was anathema to them. They all thought the villages and towns that provided them with their food were even worse than where they lived now.

While most of the common populace were firmly stuck at stage one, I did occasionally spot a sentinel or government official of some type with a stage two core. They didn’t come anywhere near the safehouse, which seemed to be in the very worst part of floor one, but I had plenty of scrying spells going and I finally had the mana needed to mimic nearly a full range of senses through them.

What I didn’t see down here was anyone with a stage three or four core. Averin had been hiding his, but I was betting he at stage four. The messenger, One-Twenty-Two, had probably had a stage two core, and his familiarity with the various sentinels manning the checkpoints we passed made me suspect he was probably a sentinel himself when he wasn’t wearing a mask.

It wasn’t surprising. Their whole society was segregated and—for the non-aristocratic members, at least—based on magical merit. Better mages got better positions and lived on higher floors. This was compounded by the fact that the children of those better mages were raised with more advantages in terms of strong ignitions, better schooling, more supplies, even something as simple as more and better-quality food. Of course they grew up to become stronger mages, which reinforced their positions near the top of the tower.

There was no way the four Great Houses didn’t recognize the giant flaw in the system they set up, which meant they didn’t consider it a flaw. Maybe they just wanted to scare people into trying harder so they didn’t fall down to the lower floors. Either way, the Sanctum of Light was not the paradise their fake religion presented itself as to the people who grew their food.

I spent my time examining the floor while I waited for Averin to either show up himself or send someone with the location of the sub-level access. As morning turned into noon and then into evening, I started getting annoyed with the delay, but when the light coming from the column running up the middle of the floor finally dimmed, I sensed a group approaching the safehouse’s front door. One of them inserted a key into the lock and turned it, then stepped inside.

None of them were familiar to me, but that didn’t mean much. The Breakers were a relatively small organization, which I took to mean compared to the total population of the Sanctum of Light. They still had thousands of members and since they valued anonymity, they operated in individual cells to prevent their whole organization from being brought down if one of them got captured. I doubted I’d be getting to know too many of them.

“You’re the consultant?” one of them asked when I met them in the front room.

“The consultant? Is that what they’re calling me?” It fit, I supposed. I’d been called worse things that were true.

“The one from… you know… from outside,” the Breaker added.

“Yes. I am the… ahem… ‘consultant.’ Do you have my information?”

“We do,” the Breaker said. He turned to one of the other four people who’d entered the safehouse and held out a hand. That Breaker, a shorter person with narrower shoulders and enough curves that even through the loose clothes I could tell she was a woman, handed him a set of three scrolls. The lead Breaker sorted through them quickly and handed one to me.

“This is a floor one map and has two service entrances marked on them. We swung by one of them, but couldn’t find anything there. Hopefully you’ll have better luck. The other is pretty far out of the way.”

“And those other two scrolls?” I asked as I telekinetically unrolled the first one and held it up to reveal a floor plan for the lowest habitable level of the tower.

The team leader held up a second scroll. “Maintenance sub-level one, though we have no idea how accurate it is. It has marks indicating access to even lower sub-levels on it, so if we can find a way down there, we might be able to keep going even deeper.”

I opened that one as well and studied it carefully. It did not resemble any sort of runic construct like I’d been hoping, but that didn’t necessarily mean my theory was wrong. It was entirely possible that the first few sub-levels were in fact nothing more than they appeared, especially if the people living in the tower were meant to have access to them.

“And the third scroll?” I prompted.

The team leader hesitated before handing it over. “This one isn’t a map. It’s… maintenance records, I guess? The last few entries should be interesting.”

I unrolled the scroll and skimmed past the early content, which was mostly just logs of mana flow readings, inscription maintenance to keep runes sharp and clear, and the occasional enchantment being laid down to replace ones that had failed due to improper mana feeding. It painted the picture of a typical magical fortress and all the little things that could go awry on workings of that scale.

The final few entries, however, detailed maintenance work gone wrong due to the presence of what the log keeper referred to as ‘anomalies’ invading the sub-levels. Over the span of three months, they lost a few dozen workers and a handful of sentinels sent in to guard them to some sort of incorporeal monster. The last entry simply stated that they would be sealing off the lower maintenance levels, to the unfortunate detriment of the first few habitation floors.

“How old is this record?” I asked.

The Breakers had to confer amongst themselves to figure that out. It turned out none of them had been responsible for retrieving it from the Sanctum’s archives, merely being in charge of delivering it to me. Since the records weren’t dated in a calendar I recognized, I wasn’t able to do more than guess from the logs themselves.

After skimming over the logs and debating some things like certain terminology and descriptions of standard procedures, the best they came up with was that the scroll was somewhere between two hundred and five hundred years old. “So maybe these monsters are still down there, or maybe there’s nothing. No way to tell until we start looking,” I said.

The four Breakers were not enthused about that idea, but neither were they surprised. With it getting dark already, we left the safehouse and walked through the never-ending slum that made up floor one until we came to an old alleyway that was filled with an ankle-deep level of refuse and debris. I could see the scrapes on the stone where a telekinetic sweep had casually tossed the garbage aside, scraping dirt and mold in the process even after it had been reburied.

“I’m going to assume this is where you were looking,” I said, giving a pointed glance at the spot I’d noticed.

“Yes,” the team leader said. “It’s where the map indicates. We triple-checked it.”

“I believe that,” I told him. “That having been said, the map is wrong. The spot you were looking for is actually right here.”

I pointed out a section of the alleyway that was a good twenty feet away from where the map indicated the maintenance entrance should be. My magic swept it clean, and I accessed the ward holding the hatch closed. Immediately, a section of stone dropped down on a hidden hinge, revealing a shaft with a ladder built into the side.

I started by sending scrying spells down into the darkness, and after those found nothing, I said, “Come on then. Let’s see how accurate that other map is.”

I jumped into the hole and activated a quick levitation spell to see me to the bottom, which was a little over two hundred feet down. The others followed behind me, one duplicating my spell and the other three slowly making their way down the dusty ladder. We waited several minutes for them to reach the bottom, time I spent mentally mapping out the maintenance sub-level with a few divination spells.

“The good news is that the map appears to be mostly accurate,” I said once all four Breakers had joined me. “The better news is that there are no signs of monsters, incorporeal or otherwise.”

Left unsaid was that incorporeal creatures were unrivaled at hiding their presence, and just because my magic hadn’t found any did not mean they didn’t exist. It was too bad the descriptions of them were so vague that there was no way to confirm what exactly they were. Plenty of incorporeal monsters could exist indefinitely in a mana-rich environment like this, but I was betting the fact that they never went any higher than the maintenance sub-levels meant they were mana fiends.

“Why mana fiends, though?” the woman Breaker asked when I shared my theory.

“They’re attracted to stable, unmoving sources of mana and they’ll attack anything that comes near it as long as it’s not another mana fiend. My best guess is the mana clusters made by the wards down here is what drew them in, and the maintenance workers weren’t anywhere near capable enough to destroy them.”

“Uh, are we capable enough?” one of the other Breakers asked.

“I am. I don’t know about you. Mana fiends aren’t that hard to kill if you know what you’re doing.”

“Rip their cores out,” one of the Breakers who’d been silent said from the back of the group. Though they were all trying to shroud their mana, I was betting he was the strongest of the four.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “Come on, the map says the drop shaft to the next sub-level is over this way and I think I’ve scried out the area already.”

We found our destination easily enough, and by the time we got there, the Breakers were all starting to relax. Not being assaulted by monsters immediately upon descending into the sub-level seemed to have done the trick. As we approached the entrance to the next sub-level, I detected a shift in the mana, though.

I pointed to the open drop shaft in the floor. “They’re coming.”

The ward that should have hidden the entrance had been broken, probably hundreds of years ago, and when we got close enough to feel their presence, they were able to feel ours. A stream of dozens of ghostly person-shaped things burst up out of the hole with more still incoming.

“That… is a lot more than I was expecting,” I said.