As they approached the coffin, Jace’s senses lit up with warning for a brief second before falling dark once more.

  “Did you feel that?” he asked Kinfild.

  “I did,” Kinfild replied, his voice soft.

  “What?” Lessa whispered. “What did you feel? It wasn’t just a gust of wind, was it? Ugh, the air here is so stale.”

  “We haven’t passed a ventilation chute in a few hours,” Jace reminded her. “Probably why.”

  “Would you two stop getting sidetracked?” Kinfild asked. “A brief flare of warning like that, before abruptly cutting off? It means someone—a conscious Wielder, not monster or beast—thought to veil themselves and dropped out of our field of perception.”

  Jace slowed to a halt, and his eyes widened. “Is a scavenger catching up to us?”

  “I cannot tell that much,” said Kinfild. “Although my senses may be more developed than yours, I still cannot determine such fine details.”

  Jace grimaced. “What do we do?”

  “Keep walking, and we make sure that one of us is always looking, keeping our eyes out for trouble.”

  Reluctantly, Jace continued onward, holding his hands up like he was ready to strike, making fists and approaching the coffin. Kinfild walked backward, keeping watch on the hallway behind, and Lessa flicked her rifle’s safety catch off.

  But they reached the stone coffin unassailed. It was a stone box, but its sides curved inward slightly, almost giving it the shape of an altar. It was about twice as wide and tall as a regular coffin, perfect for the size he imagined the Luminians to be. Runes ran up its side, joining with lines on the floor, and a single face-shaped carving protruded from the lid where the head would’ve been.

  It had a similar head shape to the guardian automatons, with almost flaring wings at the top, and it almost reminded him of a hammerhead shark—if the shark otherwise had a human expression.

  As soon as he placed his hands on the stone lid of the coffin, he expected a trap to go off, or some sort of guardian automaton to burst from the walls.

  But they’d already passed this hallway’s trials.

  With a single heave, working alone, Jace leveraged his enhanced strength to push the coffin’s lid off, revealing the inside.

  A detail-less silver sarcophagus filled the interior of the coffin, but a monotone blue hologram flickered overtop, giving it the illusion of depth and volume—and the shape of an Ancient Luminian.

  A man twice as tall as a regular human, with the same head shape as the carving outside. He wore robes that made Jace think of an Asian monk of some kind—he didn’t really know the proper term—and folded his hands over his chest.

  How the hologram was powered, Jace couldn’t say, but after a few seconds, it flickered, then shut off.

  “Running on reserve power, then,” he muttered. “Lessa, could I get a little light over here?”

  “A little light, coming right up!” She ran over to the edge of the coffin and leaned over, then held her tail over the sarcophagus. “Oh. I was kinda expecting something a little more…grim.”

  “So was I, given what we saw in the Maehn dungeon,” Jace said. Along the sides of the sarcophagus were smaller wooden canisters. Some were rectangular boxes, and some were cylinders with screw-on caps. “Surprised nothing decayed,” he muttered.

  “It was sealed,” Lessa whispered back.

  “Do you two see anything?” Kinfild asked. His back was still toward them, and he held his staff in a ready position. A technique card still floated above his hand, though at this distance, Jace couldn’t tell what the card was.

  Jace cleared his throat, then leaned down and cracked open the containers. The lids had been sealed with some sort of glue, but he could break them open easily enough with his bare hands.

  Inside the rectangular containers lay weapons. A few daggers, a curved sword nearly Jace’s entire height, and a plasma weapon that reminded him more of a tuning fork than a rifle. At first, he had no way of carrying it all, and was going to leave them behind, until he looked down at the sarcophagus’ fingers—one of the only elements that had been truly carved.

  A brass ring clung to the finger, and empty, unfuelled runes ran all around its edges. He slid the ring off the sarcophagus’ finger. It was much too large to fit on his finger, but too small to be a bracelet. However, when Lessa tried, it fit around her wrist nearly perfectly like a bangle.

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  “But you should use it,” Lessa said. “First, then I can carry it if you want.”

  “Use it?” Jace raised his eyebrows. “Oh, this seems like a terrible idea. No way am I using some magic ancient ring with runes on the side. What are the chances that it’ll glow orange if we throw it in the fire, and we’ll get some nasty guys in black cloaks coming after us?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a storage ring, Jace,” Kinfild said. “Fuel the runes and see.”

  “Not a dark lord’s soul-carrying trinket?”

  “You have that where you come from?” Lessa exclaimed.

  “Well…no, but—” Jace shook his head. “You’re telling me that there’s nothing like that here?”

  “If someone was going to bind the Enemy’s soul to a mere trinket, he would have to be very powerful,” Kinfild said. “It is more likely that he would destroy the Enemy.”

  “Okay, alright.” Jace flooded the storage ring’s runes with Aes, like he was using a vault core, and the flared blue.

  A sheet whirled up in front of him, reading, [Open middle-grade storage bangle?]

  “Yes,” Jace confirmed, also pushing with intent.

  The ring expanded to the size of a hoola-hoop in a matter of seconds, and its interior became a window through space. Instead of the hallway beyond, he could only see a metal container, trapezoidal, in standard Luminian fashion it seemed, large enough to fit a small car. There was nothing inside, and dim light came from somewhere.

  When he reached inside, it felt the exact same as the air of the hallway. A little musty, but otherwise, there was air, and it was safe. He tossed a dagger in just to be safe, and it clattered unceremoniously to the storage space’s ground.

  “I guess that’s why it’s called a storage ring,” he muttered. But it meant room to store all their extra trinkets and cards.

  He placed the weapons inside as he cracked open the cannisters. “We can sell these for more fuel and supplies when we get out,” Jace said. “And materials, in case we need to repair the Wrath, of course.”

  On the right side of the sarcophagus, all the canisters were the same size. They were individual cube-shaped wooden containers. When Jace opened them, they each contained a technique card and a pair of elixirs. One stim-shot, and one plain Aes elixir, for gathering Aes and advancing.

  He used one of the stim-shots immediately and began healing himself, then places the rest in the storage ring and analyzed the new technique cards.

  Nothing useful. He was on a water-based Path. The Wielder must’ve had five pillars, because he only had five canisters, and each was for a different technique—one utility, one fortification, one for forging, one for cursing, and one for ranged attacks. The highest quality card was a legendary forging technique.

  Though Jace couldn’t use them directly, though, they could melt down the cards and enhance them. Nothing here would be a waste.

  “What would be a good base for a fortification card?” Jace asked.

  “Preferably something close to your aspect,” Lessa answered. “Something slippery, maybe light-based, seeing as these guys called themselves the Luminians. And hopefully Legendary quality or better.”

  “Then we’d better get looking for more.” Jace glanced back into the coffin once more to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind, then picked up the still-open storage ring. “Now how do I get this guy to…close?”

  He’d damaged the Aes extraction card beyond repair, but his core still had an innate fluctuation to it, which seemed perfect for pulling Aes. Especially when the target wasn’t an accumulator node, purposely resistant to having the power drawn out of it.

  When the pressure of his core subsided, he imagined he was pulling, almost using that hyperspace movement to drain the ring.

  [Close storage ring?] asked the sheet, and he mentally confirmed. The runes faded, and the ring shrank back down to its previous bangle-sized armband. He passed it back to Lessa, and she slipped it onto her wrist.

  “If you’re done,” Kinfild said, “we should keep moving.”

  They set off down the hall, Lessa holding her tail in front of her. Jace walked beside her, and he drew his Whistling Blade, in case the source of the previous warning—and then prompt veiling—returned.

  They dodged three more traps as they continued on in the general direction of the next crust-lift, but the fourth trap had been disabled already. Not triggered, but damaged. Someone had melted a hold directly in its center.

  Jace stopped. “More scavengers? Do you think a party made it this deep before us?”

  Kinfild bent over the trap, then tapped the gash. It was a standard spike-raising trap, triggered by proximity sensors. “This incision was made by a Whistling Blade. It’s too thin and deep to be anything else.”

  “Watchmen?” Jace asked. “Unless a scavenger also got their hands on a Whistling Blade.”

  Kinfild narrowed his eyes, then stood straight up and fired a bolt of flame down the hallway off the tip of his staff. The orange bolt seared down the hall, illuminating its way, but it didn’t trigger any traps.

  There were three more points where someone had melted holes in the ground.

  Finally, about fifty meters down the hallway, the flame stopped abruptly. The pulse burst apart, tendrils writhing to the edge of the hall, and for a brief second, the silhouette of a man appeared in the center of the hall.

  Jace swallowed, then pointed his Whistling Blade out at the silhouette—or where the silhouette had been. “Who’s there?” he called.

  A normal sized man, not a Luminian. He’d probably been wearing a cloak, and the interwoven strands of his leather robe had glimmered in the faint light.

  Finally, after a few seconds of staring, a faint tag appeared down the hallway, reading, [Level 57 Aes Wielder – Soul-Circle Blending – 9th Stage].

  Jace glanced back at Kinfild. “You saw that, right?”

  “I did.” Kinfild gripped his staff with both hands.

  “Then—”

  “Greetings, worldjumper,” said the man. “I can’t say I was expecting to see you here, but it’s a welcome surprise, and I won’t waste the opportunity.”