“Hey, Mick, look at this.”

  Princess Kristie was standing in front of an unremarkable section of wall at the back of the throne room, the room itself now completely covered in vivic mist from dead Blighted moarsmen and the amount of Blight being Burned off the floor, walls, and ceiling.

  The remains of tables and shelves could be seen scattered on the floor by the walls, evidence of the merchants and their presence here at one point, but nothing was intact, it all broken and rotted by the acidic touch of the moarsmen and the corruption of the Blight.

  Indeed, those remnants were burning away as thoroughly as the Blight itself.

  The Mick wandered over. Physically he was fine, Healing Edge having kept him in the fight and the game, but his Soak was down by over half, so he was wary of getting into another big fight.

  Princess Kristie was all healed up from her fight with the king and then its bodyguards thereafter, despite having been severely mauled from all the moarsmen trying to get to her… and that was with Healing Edge feeding her Health, too. It was just that she had far more than any normal human did from her Rantha Racial Class.

  “What an inneresting section o’ wall ye’ve discovered?” he asked her, staring at the brickwork with a raised eyebrow, his hand on Bunita just in case of something surprising.

  “Yes.” She reached out, stuck her finger in the decayed stub of a torch holder there, and pulled down.

  With frankly startling quiet and smoothness, the bricks slid open on counterweights, grinding a little with dust and growth in the way, the top of it uneven and blending artfully into age cracks in the mortar.

  The Mick stared at the new opening in some surprise. “Well now, that were never something they had open back when I used t’ visit here. An’ not something they wanted their guests t’ know about either, I be takin’ it…”

  “They were lowlifes. Can you picture them NOT having a secret way out of this place if the Societies got fed up with them and decided to just storm the place?” Kris purred knowingly.

  The door started to close, and there was a blur of motion as Quaver was stabbed into the brick and stone like it was soft cheese. There was a distinct clank of something being severed, and the closing door stopped instantly as the cable of its counterweight was cut through.

  “The moarsmen obviously didn’t know of it, either, so let’s go see what was in here, shall we?”

  The Mick waved over the Roaches, keeping them on guard, and the two officers stepped into the quiet of the hallway beyond.

  It was bricked for the forward part of it, and they found lines of old storerooms, still holding crates of old supplies, both weapons and mundane. Most of them were shot through with accelerated rust, with anything magical or unstable either corroded to rot or having burned out rather explosively at one point. Alchemical arrowheads, for example, had reduced the entire inventory of archery supplies to char and ash.

  There was an office with a tightly locked door, which actually still had a working magical trap on it of dangerous strength. Kristie cut through the mechanical and magical portions of the trap, then stuck her black nail in the lock, manifested her soulclaw, and opened it with a turn of her hand.

  It looked like an office of some kind, complete with a fairly intact table, magical lighting source, and cabinets holding what looked to be bottles of booze. Papers were scattered all over the place, clearly abandoned in haste, and the place looked to have been spared most of the decay that had taken over the storerooms.

  The Mick had a wry smile as he picked up a stack of brightly lettered bills on the ground. “Ever seen these, lass?” he asked, picking them up and waving them to her.

  “Paper money?” she asked, picking up one of the wine bottles, still in its rack and stored on its side. She blew the bottle fairly clean of dust and pulled out the cork with her fingertips somehow, not even breaking it, and gave it a sniff. “Wine’s still good.” She took a long draw of it, then held it out for him, and they swapped handfuls.

  “Och, this be the old Monkner Red, done by his vineyards near Cragstone. One of the best wines they be growing here,” the Mick said after a long and satisfied draw himself. “Those be the infamous MMD’s of yore, lass. Each bill equal to two hundred and fifty thousand pyreal coins.”

  She thumbed through the thick stack once, raising a dark eyebrow at him. “There’s two hundred and fifty bills here, Lord Mick.”

  “A full stack, aye. I knew it as soon as I picked them up.” He pointed at a couple others bundles tumbled in the corner, dust on them. “These were the standard trading instruments towards the end here. Some o’ the things in the Black Market here would cost ye half a stack or more o’ the bills, an’ even the cheap stuff were often ten or more.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She still held up the stack, looking back and forth from him to it. “Do you realize how much pyreal this represents, Lord Mick?” she asked in some disbelief.

  “Sixty-two million pyreal coins,” he nodded immediately.

  “Lord Mick, that’s like three HUNDRED tons of pyreal coins,” she uttered in disbelief. “Just how much precious metal did you people have sitting around?”

  “The vendors were NPC’s. They just had enough o’ it. Mind you that those bills weren’t just printed off. Ye actually had t’ have pyreal coin t’ gain them, which generally were earned by selling loot from monster drops an’ the like. Towards the end, we’d salvage the loot all down for raw materials an’ sell the bags o’ salvage instead, unless it were a really pricey item. They’d charge us 275k for the MMD bill there, making a nice profit for themselves, but the MMD’s took up a lot less room.”

  “And now they are tinder for the fires. I want the metal that they are worth!” Her eyes lit up strangely. “Are there any places you know of that might have NPC’s who survived the Fall and can cash these in?”

  The Mick blinked. “Merchant NPC’s who survived the Fall? I don’t…” he frowned, trailing off. “There were Dungeons where NPC’s existed, just like here, but out o’ the way, in addition to those wandering around in the wilds. I dinnae think there are any in the wild what survived the Fall without coming t’ town, but NPC’s…”

  “Not just NPC’s, but NPC’s who never updated to the changing times. The merchants in Stonehold don’t accept MMD’s anymore, they’ve shifted to the new paradigm and are mostly free of NPC status, likely because Briggs was there so long. But if there are some who are still plugged into the old iteration of the system, and haven’t had any meaningful visitors…” she trailed off.

  “Me first thought is the Underground City, aye, but that be near Cragstone, an’ I be sure that Bonecrusher cleared that out o’ anything Isparian, an’ drudges infest it now.”

  “That’s the island in the center of the lake where they buried Thorsten, right?” she asked to confirm her memory of it. “I do seem to remember drudges on the beaches of the place in the morning when Ryin and I ran by it, back when we first arrived.”

  “Aye. So, there were faction headquarters, and society headquarters, but all o’ those were destroyed or overrun, naught remained behind that didn’t die. The only one I be thinking that might still be intact be the Mountain Sewers by Mayoi.”

  “And why would it be intact?” she asked reasonably.

  “Because Mayoi be the territory o’ the master’s undead, an’ they be having no reason to go in an’ explore it all these years. The place were infested with zefir spawns, an’ nothing ever tried to infiltrate it without causing a ruckus an’ bringing shite down on them. We can ask the Old Master, but I’m pretty sure he never checked out the bottom o’ the place, even though it had a lifestone in it. Sure’n nobody ever considered it a place to hide in, despite all that was happening.”

  “Sure, it would just be dying in a hole in the ground.” She waved the stack of old bills at him. “But if it’s just them, it may not have reset the system. Three HUNDRED TONS of pyreal, Lord Mick, right here.”

  He looked at her, then bent down and picked up the other stacks of old bills on the floor, carefully tucking them into his Masspack. “Ye know, most o’ the older sorts wanted to hold onto the bills for novelty sake, but they degraded and moldered away over time. I don’t know anyone who actually has any o’ the old bills,” he said thoughtfully, and looked around, his dark eyes narrowing suddenly. “That much metal, it would do a lot fer payin’ fer new Artifice, would it not?”

  “Three hundred tons translates to sixty thousand man-days of goldweight, twice that if used for air or lightning-type magic. That could be most of a year’s supply of the stuff.”

  “Then we should be looking for more worthless paper,” he said urgently.

  “Bottom drawer,” she said to him, kicking the desk. “They didn’t have time to clean it out, I gather.”

  The Mick moved around the side and carefully eased open the bottom drawer, pulling it all the way out and setting it on the random papers on the desk there… papers drifting off it and the ground now, as Quaver was gathering them all up while floating about on its own, using Prestidigitation magic.

  He eyeballed it expertly. “Twenty-four stacks. Same size as what one of the old backpack compartments would hold.” He slid open the other drawers, just to be sure, and there was only one more stack in the back of one of them.

  Kris was looking through the paperwork discarded randomly about them, while the Mick dropped the stacks of old MMD notes into his Masspack.

  “More fine reading?” he asked, watching her expression as she thumbed through the goods there.

  “Names of who the Freebooters were buying and selling their goods from, crafters who were making some of them. Basically contracts and invoices. Freebooting my arse, this is decent accounting.”

  “I might know some o’ those names,” he offered.

  “You might, indeed, although I’m not sure what good it will do us now.” The thick stack of those went with the bundle of MMD’s she held into her own pack. “I think we need to search the rest of the rooms, right?”

  “Aye, I be thinking they might have left some money behind, thinkin’ t’ come back for it, or, belikes, not giving a shit for pocket change bein’ lost, aye?” He watched her take the booze off the wall for her backpack with approval, taking another slug of the wine as she did so, and they laughed as they swapped the bottle back and forth until it was gone as they headed out to explore the rest of the place.

  ------

  “Valus be praised an’ Aru bring His light o’ discovery to us,” the Mick breathed out, putting his hand on the roughly-hewn wall of the corridor that had wound down and around from the rooms of the Freebooters above.

  A vein of bright green pyreal ore, interspersed with odd milky white crystals, spread out wider than his hand as it extended through the stone.

  The two of them walked quietly through the open mine, looking at the thick veins and quality of the pyreal.

  “This was the stuff they didn’t mine,” Princess Kristie pointed out in a low voice, and the Mick nodded slowly.

  Five minutes and two levels down later, they stared at the end of a rough corridor, rocks still scattered about it, the mining tracks leading up to it and stopping here.

  The wall had a display of pyreal ore at least five feet across in all dimensions.

  ============================

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