Chapter 79: The Archaeology of Guesses

  Rule number one of horror movies, uncharted realities, and deep-sea diving: you do not split the party.

  "We stay within the headlights," Jack’s voice crackles over the Whisper-Link, sharp. "If you step into the shadows, you better have a damn good reason, and you better announce it. I am not playing hide-and-seek with a giant rock and a squishy guy in a graveyard."

  "Understood," Vrex rumbles.

  "Aye, captain," I agree, kicking my legs to hover just above the deck of the Paperweight.

  Our iron bathtub chugs along the sea floor, its heavy treads grinding ancient, hexagonal paving stones into dust. The two massive headlamps on the bow cut through the crushing dark, illuminating a cone of ruined architecture and drifting silt. Inside the bubble of light, we operate as a highly-lethal expeditionary force. Outside the light, the Sunken Gate looms as an abyss of unknowns.

  My Guise of the Traveler hums quietly, masking my signature, though I remain entirely unsure what I am hiding from. My Kensho (11) completely lacks a single hostile entity ping since we stepped out of the airlock. I scan exclusively cold, dead water.

  The Astrolabe, however, enjoys a field day.

  Every meter we push the Paperweight forward, a tiny sliver of silver light etches itself into the Arc of Remembrance. It serves as a slow drip of experience, the cosmic equivalent of walking into the unrevealed gray areas of an RTS map.

  [Exploration Progress: 0.005%]

  "Look at the masonry on the left," Vrex says, his massive form trudging alongside the boat, his Ballast Core keeping him perfectly buoyant. He points a thick finger at a row of collapsed structures. "It is entirely uniform. No mortar. The blocks were fused together. Heat application?"

  I swim closer to the edge of the light, bringing my face near one of the toppled pillars. A thin layer of pale green algae covers it. I wipe it away with my gloved hand.

  Underneath, the stone feels smooth and glassy. Vitrified.

  "They melted it. Vrex, this looks like the Kiln-Heart Slag we bought, but... it's a whole building."

  Jack drifts down from his position above us, his neon-magenta armor casting a jarring, cyberpunk glow against the ancient ruins. "Takes a lot of juice to flash-melt a city block. fire? Orbital bombardment?"

  "Or a cascading failure," I suggest, looking around the plaza. The buildings look warped. Giant arches droop exactly like wax left in the sun. "What if they had a magical power grid that went critical? If the whole city was wired, a feedback loop would cook the infrastructure from the inside out."

  "Plausible," Jack admits, raising his rifle to track a school of translucent, blind fish darting through the ruins. "But look at the layout. It's radial. Everything points toward a center."

  We follow the curve of the main thoroughfare. The Paperweight grumbles as it climbs a slight incline, the treads slipping momentarily on the slick, vitrified stone.

  As we crest the ridge, the headlights wash over a massive depression in the center of the city.

  The ground caves into a massive subsidence zone. Something collapsed entirely from below.

  "Implosion," Vrex states, stopping at the edge. The stone floor of the city simply curls inward, spiraling down into a massive, perfectly spherical bowl vanishing into the dark. "Whatever was in the center pulled the surrounding matter into itself."

  I hover over the abyss, staring down. My Kensho strains, trying to find a pattern, a logical flow to the destruction. I reach out with a tiny, Regnant-level thread of Lumen, casting an active ping into the crater to see what the Astrolabe can digest.

  A faint, ghostly whisper brushes against my mind. It manifests exclusively as a Memory of the World—a residual imprint left by the sheer trauma of the event.

  ...the pressure... the cage cracks... the water boils...

  [Data Fragment Acquired: The Boiling Tide]

  [Context: Corrupted. Insufficient Data.]

  "They boiled the ocean," I whisper, pulling back from the edge. The sheer scale of it makes my newly reinforced Horizon shiver.

  "Whatever happened here, it wasn't a slow decline. The water rushed in to fill the vacuum, hit the heat of the collapse, and flash-boiled."

  "A weapon test gone wrong," Jack guesses, crossing his arms. The servos in his suit whine. "Tier 1 worlds do that. They don't have magic to bend the rules safely, so they try to bend physics with brute force. Sometimes, physics pushes back."

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  "Or they were trying to cage something," I murmur, thinking of the Null-Architect, and the Nascency in Arcanorum. "Civilizations love putting things in boxes that shouldn't be boxed."

  "A debate for historians," Vrex decides, turning his back on the crater. "There is no salvage in a void. We map the perimeter."

  We spend the next six hours doing exactly that. The process feels methodical, tedious, and profoundly creepy.

  The ruins yield only silence. The water washed away all terminals, journals, and soft materials centuries ago, leaving strictly bare stone. We only uncover small, cryptic hints.

  We locate a building resembling a library, filled entirely with thousands of magnetically wiped, blank metallic plates. I pocket a few blank plates anyway—they register as [Grade 1: Inert (Memory-Steel)] and I figure I can use them as high-durability throwing cards or shims later.

  We discover a residential sector featuring doors built for beings standing at least nine feet tall and incredibly narrow.

  "Spindly locals," Jack notes, shining his rifle's under-barrel light into a dark doorway. "Probably aquatic or semi-aquatic. The water pressure here would crush a standard human, but if they were built like eels..."

  "Then where are the bones?" I ask, floating above a ruined courtyard.

  The grim question feels absolutely necessary. A dead city typically leaves bodies. The Sunken Gate, however, remains immaculately clean.

  "Vaporized in the heat flash," Jack suggests.

  "Or harvested?" Vrex rumbles, kicking a piece of debris.

  And of course he doesn't elaborate.

  The fog of war slowly peels back on my Schema.

  [Exploration Progress: 0.12%]

  [Remembrance Accumulated: Steady]

  It flows as a thick, constant stream of Starlight, entirely different from the massive, instant burst of fighting a boss. Just by existing here, by perceiving the ruins and letting the Astrolabe index the tragedy, my soul grows heavier. It perfectly matches Jack's promise: peaceful, profitable grinding.

  I practice my Kinetic Flow as we move.

  I actively engage with the environment, proactively finding targets. I locate a massive, waterlogged wooden beam pinning a stone door shut. I extend my mind gently, feeling the exact water resistance, the friction of the stone, and the rot in the wood. I apply a gentle, rolling torque.

  The beam slowly lifts, rotating gracefully in the water, and drifts away to land softly in the silt.

  "Show off," Jack mutters.

  "Repetition builds the foundation," Vrex approves.

  By the time my internal clock tells me it reaches late evening—though the absolute blackness of the ocean never changes—exhaustion begins setting in. My Lumen remains perfectly locked at 15/15 due to the dead atmosphere. Severe mental fatigue causes the strain. Staring into the dark, expecting a monster to jump out for six hours straight, completely frays my nerves.

  "Alright," Jack's voice comes through the link, sounding equally tired. "I'm calling it. The map is updated for this grid sector. We've got a decent sweep of the northern ruins. Let's pull back to the ship and set up camp."

  "Agreed," Vrex says.

  We guide the Paperweight into the center of a wide, relatively intact plaza. Vrex kills the steam engine, and the heavy rhythmic thumping dies, leaving us in the oppressive silence of the deep.

  We climb onto the flat, iron roof of the boat's main cabin. Jack taps a sequence into his wrist console. A secondary, wider forcefield projects outward from his suit, expanding to cover the roof of the boat. The water inside the bubble instantly purges, pushed out completely by a sudden surge of atmospheric pressure.

  Suddenly, we sit in a pocket of warm, dry air, smelling faintly of lavender and ozone.

  I deactivate my Gill-Mesh Choker with a gasp, taking my first real breath of air all day. I drop onto the rusted deck, splaying my arms out.

  "Oh, thank god," I groan, my bones popping as the water pressure vanishes. "I was starting to feel like a stepping stone."

  Jack unlatches his helmet, the holographic mohawk fizzling out. He sets the heavy helm down and runs a gauntleted hand through his scruffy hair. He looks older without the pink neon glaring in his face.

  "Not a bad first run," Jack says, pulling a sleek, silver thermos from a thigh compartment. "No hostiles, no reality tears, and we mapped a solid two square miles. The Astrolabe is eating it up."

  Vrex stands at the edge of the forcefield, his hands resting on the pommel of his hammer, looking out into the dark water pressing against our bubble.

  "It is too quiet," the gargoyle says.

  "Take the win, Vrex," I say, sitting up and rummaging through my Locus. I pull out a Void-Fruit and a Nutri-Brick. I toss the brick to Jack, who catches it with a grunt of thanks. "We don't need to fight for our lives every single day. Sometimes it's okay to just be interdimensional archaeologists."

  Jack uncaps his thermos. The smell of spiced, dark coffee fills the bubble. He takes a long pull and sighs. "He's just mad because there was nothing to punch. You put a tank in a museum, he gets antsy."

  "I do not get antsy," Vrex replies, not turning around.

  I bite into the Void-Fruit. The electric blueberry flavor pops on my tongue, sending a tiny jolt of static through my teeth. It provides a good feeling. Highly grounding.

  "So," I say, leaning back on my elbows and looking up. Beyond Jack's forcefield, the water forms a ceiling of absolute black. "What's the verdict, veteran? Do we keep pushing the perimeter tomorrow? Try to find the epicenter of the implosion?"

  "Yeah," Jack nods, chewing methodically on the dry ration block. "The epicenter is where the loot will be. If it was a weapon, the firing mechanism might still be intact. If it was a cage... the lock might be salvageable. We just have to make sure we don't accidentally turn it on."

  "I will handle the physical bypasses," Vrex volunteers. "Kaelen, you stick to the magical disarming. Do not throw rocks at delicate machinery."

  "It worked on the Parasite," I reply.

  "The Parasite was a biological tumor," Jack points out. "If you throw a rock into a quantum-locked fusion drive, it creates a black hole. Let's try to leave this world with the same number of limbs we arrived with."

  "Deal."

  The conversation drifts. We completely avoid the topics of the multiverse's nature, the hierarchy of gods, and the looming threat of the Spire back in Arcanorum.

  We talk exclusively about Jack's ship. He complains about the salt water inevitably ruining the custom matte finish on the Sunk Cost's hull, forcing him to spend a fortune on Alchemical Wax upon our return to the Gyre.

  Vrex spends twenty minutes meticulously scraping a patch of barnacles off his left greave with his Void-Knife, muttering about the corrosive properties of iodine on silicate structures.

  I simply sit there, listening to them. A heavily armed, neon-pink veteran, and a three-hundred-year-old rock monster, sit at the bottom of a dead ocean in an uncharted dimension, loudly complaining about paint jobs and barnacles.