The remaining battle with the wood golem becomes a matter of preserving cosmic energy. Joe spills his own like alcohol on a fire. Candra and Officer Bernice whack at the remaining limb with fervor.

  The automaton pushes to right itself with one arm. Its legs kick out. Joe balances atop it, treating his sword more like a hatchet. Shards of wood burst off. He shifts his weight, trying to pin the tree in place.

  Todd conserves his shots for when they count most. Instead, he runs over to Joe’s fallen bag and roots around for his [mercury rod]. Infusing the tool, he starts to shape it into a machete, same as Candra.

  Officer Bernice is thrown cartwheeling through the air. From up, the limb of the golem swings back down in an attempt to crush Candra. She shrieks and holds her shield above her head. Her knees give under the pressure, but she stops the descent.

  Todd ducks back down and sprays under the toppled golem. Its leg slips out from under it and it falls again.

  “Let me know if you want to switch out,” Todd tells a direly sweating Joe.

  The tall young man nods once and settles back into his assault. He strikes until the golem heaves again and throws him off.

  By this point, the construct’s last remaining arm is mostly torn apart. Brutal grooves are cut out of the heart of the bole.

  Officer Bernice gives a spirited shout as she regroups. Candra grabs hold of a branch and is physically dragged along as she chops at it.

  Todd tentatively dips forward. He swings a machete at the leg of the golem. Swiftly, he dips back.

  Three times he takes little bites out of the leg. Then he misjudges the timing. The pillar thuds into his side and he’s flung eight feet away. His hip is tender as he stands. Broken capillaries flush in the first stages of a forming bruise.

  Care, persistence, and time. That’s what it takes to finally whittle down the sentinel of the chamber.

  They take its remaining arm first. They knock it down. They pile on and wrestle with the flailing nubs. They take turns with Joe’s sword, collectively under the impression that this will end when the thing is cut in half.

  Todd’s wrist feels like it’s sprained. Jangling knocks spread up to his shoulder. His body wants to give up. He’s never really been able to sustain this kind of concentrated exercise. But his friends don’t relent, so he refuses to either.

  There are a few tense moments, but they continue in their efforts. Sweat pours. Muscles strain.

  There’s no way of knowing what the final threshold is, but the golem slows and goes rigid.

  Joe pants. He pauses, uncertain. There was no cosmic energy gained from the kill.

  Then there is a rattling noise as thirty two crystals appear in the air and fall into a loose pile.

  Todd checks his quest and with elation, remarks that it has been cleared.

  Officer Bernice collapses into the dirt. Candra arches her back and pops her spine. Joe lays his hands on his knees and bends over.

  They gather their scattered bags and possessions. They use their minor healing pills and it’s insufficient to fully recover.

  There is no raised contention, the four cultivators agree to recuperate here before heading out. Each of them takes a nexus crystal from their prize and meditates to absorb it. Todd soaks up the energy thirstily, his cultivation technique slurping from the stone in pulses. It’s a bit of a waste to use the crystal to restore his reserves instead of pushing his cultivation forward, but what use is another level if you’re dead?

  Joe laughs in released tension and soon the others are laughing as well. Todd isn’t sure he finds the situation funny. He doesn’t join in.

  With a resigned sigh, he looks down at his ixwa. The tip of the blade has snapped off sometime during the fight. He wonders if it will still work, or whether he’ll have to go back to relying on his [mercury rod]. Machetes have been working well for him so far, so he forms one of his own.

  Candra ends up asking the most important question. “So which way did we come in?”

  The yellow fractal barriers have vanished and four equidistant tunnels lead out of the chamber. The problem is that they never marked their point of ingress. They’ll have to trace the route all the way back to the prior intersection to find the right tunnel. All four of them have been bashed about enough to knock their initial sense of direction off kilter. There’s real uncertainty.

  “I think, that one?” Todd says, racking his brain. He points. He’s fairly sure.

  “It’s not like we aren’t lost already,” Candra complains.

  Before they leave, one thing they seriously consider is taking down some of the glowing crystals above. Unfortunately, they’re too high to reach, and the only idea to retrieve them is to throw something at them. There are some attempts, but on a success, the metal rod shatters the brittle rock. Its inner luminance flickers and dies. Dirt showers down too, sparking the fear of a cave in. Next, Joe tries to run up the circumference of the sphere like a ramp, but he lands badly on his ankle and only plucks out one before he’s completely winded. Reluctantly, they give up.

  There’s a balance between being fully mended, and running out of time. Joe and Candra are especially wary of ending the three days without finishing the quest. Prematurely, they convince Officer Bernice that it’s time to move on.

  They thread choked subterranean byways for another day. Beaten and tired, they sometimes struggle to fight against the vermin which had been much easier to handle the day before. They are especially wary of caverns they come across. Once or twice, they actually turn around rather than tackle a particularly large one.

  Infrequent cave-ins block their way. They make further detours. They double back.

  The other risk is that a monster body will fill the tunnel when it dies, leaving them unable to progress. Squeezing around one specific bloody and stinking corpse, Todd resolves to file the experience into his trauma vault where it belongs.

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  Still, they make progress, covering miles of distance. They stop to eat, cultivate, and share words of encouragement. Officer Bernice prays.

  Their big break comes as they cross a grid of tunnel intersections. The section is clearly artificial, and leads towards a central area. As they cross straight through, they are constantly flanked by wandering beasts coming around corners. It’s an arduous stretch.

  The ceilings are high here. Orange grit runs in two parallel tracks down the hallway. It crunches underfoot.

  Todd lowers his hand. His [water spear] has pierced a monstrous vole through the shoulder. His heart quails, but he still stalks towards it with his [mercury rod] and puts it out of its misery.

  The four of them have stumbled on a wide open area that has markings of a foundation in the corner. A thin layer of rust marks out a section of square footage. Round cylinders of rust poke up a millimeter from the stone floor.

  Sometime long ago, there was a structure here that partitioned the space. Todd sees it as further evidence that this place used to be some kind of mine.

  The fight to clear the room takes twenty minutes. Stragglers keep arriving, and it’s impossible to tell whether or not more are one their way.

  Waiting for something else to emerge from the darkness, Todd pokes a toe through flakes of metal oxide. Wood and metal have long since decayed down here. Only stone lasts.

  “Hey! Check out this wall!” Candra entreats.

  Still watching the adjoining halls, Todd makes his way over towards the flat surface of wall that Candra has indicated.

  At first, he only perceives discoloration. But as he focuses, he starts to recognize what he sees. It’s paint, flaking off the stone. There are branching lines which travel between larger dots. Thin strokes of something that looks like text is worn away nearly completely. But underneath the paint, if you stare really closely, you can see a hint of the color left behind.

  “I’m hoping this is a map. This looks like a map, right?” Candra optimistically projects.

  “A little!” Officer Bernice exclaims, “I can see it being one anyways.”

  “I don’t know how we’re supposed to read it though,” Todd despairs.

  “Come on, I’m sure you’ll figure it out!” Joe cheerfully encourages.

  The four of them pore over the diagram. Once or twice they stop each other from touching the fragile paint by accident.

  “The first question is, which dot represents us?” Todd sighs.

  “The one in the middle,” Candra asserts.

  “We can’t know that for sure, we could easily be on the edge,” Todd gently pushes back.

  “Shouldn’t there be a star or a mark or something?” Officer Bernice wonders.

  Inch by inch, Todd commits the lines of the map to memory. “Maybe,” he murmurs, “these were aliens, we don’t know how they thought.”

  Candra bounces on her toes. “There’s a white spot here next to the dot!”

  Todd narrows his eyes. He isn’t sure he can detect the mark she’s talking about. It could easily just be a feature of the rock. “Are you sure?”

  Candra jabs a finger. “Yes. This is us, I’m sure of it.”

  There’s a certain amount to which Todd feels that this is wishful thinking. “If you’re right, that leaves the question of where we’re headed to,” he says.

  “Well… what does the quest say?”

  “It just says Yin Dong.”

  Candra puts her hands on her hips. “Do you have any bright ideas?”

  Todd throws up one hand. “No. The only thing I can think of is to pick the largest dot on the map and go there.”

  Joe picks up on that idea and runs with it. “That’s not a bad call! At least we’ll be able to find more information, or a more complete map.”

  “Better than running around blind,” Officer Bernice offers.

  Todd has a sudden urge to roll his eyes. They are making a lot of assumptions here. Nothing at all promises that a larger hub will provide anything more than further rot.

  Todd and the others try to burn the map into their retinas. It’s not like they have anything to write with. Maybe the mushroom paste. Wait.

  Todd asks for permission and then paints a much simplified version of the map onto Officer Bernice’s gi back. It won’t last. They’ll have to redraw it. It will have to serve.

  There’s a five minute argument about which tunnel to exit from. They select a broad rounded tunnel with rusted out tracks and head out. Half an hour in, they change their mind and circle back. They change directions and this time the tunnel curves according to how they expect it to.

  The map didn’t provide any landmarks aside from the dots, and only one of those dots is positioned between them and their goal. They’ll only really know they’re headed in the right direction when they reach it.

  There are no longer natural caverns along the way. Everything has been mined out. Along they way, they crawl through a gap in an incomplete cave in, and Todd nearly has a panic attack.

  They’ve pinned everything on the map, and their incomplete understanding of it.

  The artery is wide enough that when they encounter beasts, they often find a dozen at a time. Todd’s hand shakes. The butchery weighs on him. The waste of it disgusts him. Level thirteen approaches, dirty and unpleasant.

  They sleep restlessly, and then continue on.

  When they discover the next outpost, a great sense of relief comes over them. Vindication. Candra hugs Joe, lifts him off the ground and spins him. The scattered ruins of many former buildings fill the open tiers of the chamber. Nothing of value can be found except faded paint on the walls. A mural was here. Something big and colorful anyways. The four of them don’t stop to rest.

  Only a third of the distance remains to the large dot, however there isn’t much time left. If they’ve picked the wrong destination at this point, then they’re out of luck for sure.

  They don’t have any brighter ideas, so they push on.

  At some point, signs of further habitation start to appear. The detritus begins looking more and more domestic as the outlines of beds and stoves stick out amid the rot.

  The only sign of life is a tenacious strain of enormous silverfish which overruns this section of tunnel.

  Todd’s boots receive a workout as he stomps on them remorselessly. After all, bugs are different. He doesn’t have much sympathy for bugs.

  Sticky with insect viscera, the four of them emerge into a great open cavern with high stone pillars. There’s an immediate change in the atmosphere. A musty smell permeates. Underfoot, the ground is uneven, swelling and falling in waves and troughs. A layer of dust and grime coats that same floor, along with thick hairs. Around them, the remains of numerous degraded buildings have been crushed or swept away by traffic.

  This place is inhabited. Todd closes into tight formation with the others and wills his [mercury rod] to sharpen. If they’re going to get attacked somewhere, it’s going to be here.