Keiran

I glanced around, curious to see if any other secret panels would open to reveal guardians that had long since lost any semblance of power. Whoever had been in charge of security must have decided that one was enough, or else the panels had malfunctioned in some way. It might be as simple as there not being enough mana to activate them, much like everything else down here.

It was honestly surprising that even this single door had held onto the flicker of mana needed to slide three feet to the right before dying. It hadn’t even made it all the way open, either, which was what had caused the construct to topple over onto its side instead of falling straight forward. Once I was sure there was no mana left inside it, I approached it curiously.

At its full height, it’d be eight feet tall and probably weighed half a ton. It was human-shaped, though with the exaggerated trunk common to constructs, making it appear something like a barrel with limbs. It was difficult to condense everything needed to keep a construct functioning into a human-sized chest cavity, even if it was scaled up to this construct’s height.

I rolled it onto its back with magic and straightened out the limbs so I could examine them. It appeared to be smooth metal, the same reflective steel that the door I’d passed through was made of, but there were no runes carved into its surface. I suspected I’d find them on the inside of the plates, but unfortunately, the easiest way to tell was to run mana through the construct so that I could see them.

That sounded like an extraordinarily foolish idea. Reanimating a guardian construct just to have it immediately attempt to kill me wasn’t on my list of mistakes to make this life. I’d already done that once with an undead that had been on the brink of expiring, only to have to put it down a minute later when it attacked me. I hadn’t even gotten the chance to study it like I’d wanted.

That wasn’t an issue this time. This construct had survived for probably a thousand years or more, and I had all the time in the world to poke and prod it, to tear it apart and see how it worked. I was tempted to stick it in my phantom space right now for later study so that I could get back to tracing the mysteel pillar to see if there were more.

Before I could make good on my plan, I noticed something where the golem’s broad chest met its throat, a seam of sorts. I couldn’t open it from the outside, and even my divinations were struggling to slip through its mirrored outer shell, but I wasn’t willing to be defeated after a mere minute of effort.

An inch or two of metal shouldn’t be strong enough to block my spells without any sort of warding scheme backing it up. Whatever this material was, it hadn’t existed during my last life and I was starting to find it annoying now. On the other hand, if I could figure out how to make it myself, it could be extraordinarily useful.

After twenty minutes of tinkering, I finally managed to modify a steel shaping spell enough to curl the lip of the seam open a paper’s width so I could slip a divination spell inside. As I’d suspected, the interior was so densely carved with runes that it would be the work of weeks to sort them all out. What was strange about the whole thing was that the inside of the golem was largely hollow, more a mass of braided steel cables running through the limbs than anything else. Even odder, my scrying spells were reacting to the material in some way and starting to pull apart the longer I looked.

“What are you?” I muttered to the motionless body. “I’m almost tempted to feed you some power, just to see what happens. As soon as I can construct a safe cage to hold you, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

For now, I stowed the construct away. Once I had it back to my workshops, it was getting my undivided attention, but this wasn’t what I was here for. I already had a giant pillar of mysteel, far more than I’d expected to find, and I needed to get back to dealing with that.

I approached the pillar and did a lap around it, just studying the runes carved onto its surface. I could already tell it had noncontinuous connections to other sites down here, possibly as some sort of cheap, low-distance teleportation hub. Whether it was for people or something else remained to be seen, but either way, it boded well for the existence of other mysteel pillars.

There was no way I could remove this thing and chop it up before I knew what it was for. I’d been expecting a destroyed system, but the pillar was in pristine condition. It might even be possible to reactivate it, though I couldn’t imagine the Hierophant had anywhere near enough mana in his treasury to tempt me more than the mysteel itself. No, this thing was mine now.

I settled in for a long night of deciphering rune constructs, the process sped up by my divinations peering at it from every angle at once. So far underground, with no sun or moon to track time, I lost myself in my work, stopping occasionally for food or a nap. And slowly, so slowly, I started to unravel the pillar’s secrets.

* * *

“Three weeks,” Keeper told me. “I thought you were dead.”

She was sitting in a different chair at a different desk with different books spread out in front of her this time. I wasn’t sure what she was working on, but she had this set up replicated at least thirty times throughout her new archive. Apparently, carrying the books to one central location just wasn’t her style.

“Why would I be dead?” I asked.

“It was supposed to be a day, maybe two, before you returned to the surface. I expected you’d run into some sort of trouble, a cave in perhaps, or a strong monster that ambushed you.”

“No, no, nothing like that. There was simply a lot down there. It took some time to sort it all out.”

And I still hadn’t even gotten started on that golem yet. After I’d finished the first mysteel pillar, I’d discovered no less than twelve more of them. Those were all smaller, only about ten feet tall and two wide, but the runes carved onto their surfaces had been just as dense as the large one. After having thoroughly examined them, I understood why such an expensive project had been approved.

They were masterful, a rune carving virtuoso’s life project. No, it would take a whole team of them working in concert for years. The pillars didn’t just have a single set of runes on the outside. They were layered, dozens and dozens of concentric mysteel sheets in the larger pillar and twenty or so in the smaller ones. Each layer had its own distinct rune structures carved on the inside, meaning each pillar had hundreds of thousands of runes at minimum.

They had a hundred or more functions. If they were properly powered, they could allow those connected to their network to teleport around the entire city at will, or send supplies to designated locations. Users could track every single living creature in the city in real time, raise barriers to block or trap invaders, or even teleport them into prisons.

It was also a city-wide communication hub, and not just for the military. Every single person in the city, including temporary visitors, would be automatically tagged with an identification enchantment that allowed the network to target them for any of its various functions. They could be denied entry or deported at will, though from what I could tell, those kinds of administrative privileges required more than a casual level of access.

Beyond that, when activated, the mysteel pillars would radiate mana upwards to promote health in Derro’s citizens, making them stronger and more resistant to disease. Administrators could designate sections of the city, arranged in a grid, that let people use magic like levitation at will, drawing on the pillars to power the spells.

They could also connect with other cities to enable long distance communication, though I hadn’t been able to discover any coordinates for additional mysteel networks. It looked like they sent out a signal when activated that allowed them to find each other.

If I had to guess, my theory was that they’d drawn all of their power in one titanic surge to deflect a huge chunk of moon debris falling on the city many, many centuries ago. Even that hadn’t been enough to completely protect Derro. With the loss of ambient mana in the world and the damage from the sky falling, they’d probably been knocked out and never been powered back up.

“And you found the mysteel?” Keeper asked.

“I did.”

“Did the quantity meet our expectations?”

“It did not,” I said. We’d expected connecting lines to span the city, but that hadn’t been the case.

“You don’t seem upset about that,” Keeper remarked, her expression shrewd. “Maybe you found something better.”

“Someone certainly put a lot of work into the project,” I said, feigning disinterest. It would not be wise to let Keeper know how keen I was on my discovery. She’d use it to raise the price on information about future sites to explore. “Removing the mysteel is going to be a chore, but there’s enough down there to make it worth the effort.”

“I see,” she said in a tone that made it clear that she knew I was hiding something. “Three weeks just to survey how much is down there seems a bit much.”

I waved off her concern. “I like to be thorough. Even though I had no reason to think there’d be any mana left in the system, I wasn’t about to start cutting pieces of it off without confirming. That much mysteel could hold enough mana to destroy the whole city.”

That was an understatement. The central pillar could do that by itself if it was fully charged. Adding the ancillary ones would also destroy every single outlying farm village around Derro. It might even wipe out the entire basin, which included New Alkerist.

“Oh. I… see,” Keeper said again, this time considerably taken aback. “Then… you’ve extracted it safely?”

“No, I haven’t started yet. This system is more complex than the old sky engines that held floating cities up in the air I’m familiar with. All that work was just to confirm I understood what it was designed to do so that I could safely salvage it.”

Keeper considered that for a few seconds, her fingers tapping together. “What happens now?” she finally asked.

“I need to check on some other things I’ve been neglecting, like making sure the reagents for your potions are coming along properly, then I go back down and start dismantling everything.”

That was a lie. I wasn’t going to dismantle anything. I was going to relocate it to my demesne and set it back up there. It would take some tweaking, but the defensive capabilities it offered were absurdly powerful. The only issue was going to be how mana hungry the pillars were, but I was confident I could keep the costs reasonable as long as I didn’t activate anything but the protective measures. I hardly needed a communication hub or an on-call teleportation network, after all.

“And how long will that take?” Keeper asked.

I shrugged. The smaller pillars were easy enough, but the big one was too large to fit in my phantom space, so I’d be upgrading that first. “A few more weeks,” I guessed. “Mysteel isn’t exactly easy to work with.”

“Hmph. Good enough. When you’ve finished that and given me the rest of my fee, we can discuss the next location I’ve discovered. This one is a bit farther afield, but I’m confident you can find it with the clues I’m digging up.”

As loath as I was to destroy something so sophisticated, I did need several thousand tons of mysteel to patch up the ruptured shell around the world core. This probably wouldn’t be enough, but I had to start somewhere.

I said my goodbyes to Keeper and teleported away.