Finding the area with the undead and the glowing Stones and old Crossbow sitting around wasn’t that difficult, and Master Ben Ten was pleased to deal with all of the revenants there with a misting Blade of Firephased flame. Everyone knew I could have waved my hand and exterminated them, but both of the men with me considered it a point of pride that I not have to in a place like this.

  Master Ben Ten actually took temporary leave of us as we found the forked area; one branch leading to the underground town, the other to where more undead existed. Briggs led the way down, dealing with any minor annoyances on the way.

  The first affirmation that we were truly in the right place was the Deathstone Crater.

  This had been one of the very rare places that had one of the great blue Crystals and wasn’t outdoors, making it pretty unique as such things went. It was also why it was called an underground city, even though only three NPC’s had dwelled down here.

  Resupply questions were actually simple, as at one point people had been able to Recall to their Lifestones, so the natives could have used a Lifestone Tie to go to a city, buy up things, then Recall back here.

  But still, nobody came here. There was no reason to use this as a base of operations at all.

  The shattered blue crystal fragments were still embedded in the floors, walls, and ceiling, unworn at all by the lack of weather, humming with uncontrolled mana and power fresh and unconstrained.

  Briggs held out Endure. Lost Light spirals rode up around the Greathammer, reaching out aggressively for those blue crystals, quietly setting them on vivic fire in sparkling Motes of electrum Light.

  “Up there,” I gestured to him, his eyes roving the pit.

  Only two skeletons, fused in the crater around where the crystal’s stand had once been, both Isparians. Truly a Deathstone that hadn’t seen much active use. I imagined it might have been a supplier or a smuggler converting coin in a place away from other eyes… or someone who was simply being hunted by others and wanted a Deathstone nobody was going to bother camping.

  There were stairs going up to the higher level in one of the nearby rooms, but Briggs just hopped up to the second floor with barely a flexing of his knees, and I followed him up.

  The people there were NPC’s for certain. Despite being sealed away from resupply and human contact, their clothes were in perfect shape, they were waiting at their positions for us, and they weren’t even dusty or anything.

  The smith there hadn’t fired his forge up for years, that was certain, yet there wasn’t a trace of dust on his anvil, forge, or tools. He was of southern blood, skin even darker than mine and hair just as white. He looked quite stern and stolid, waiting patiently in silence as we came into view.

  I looked at Briggs, who shook his head, keeping his Source Aura tight.

  The peddler was Aluvian. Briggs had a thoughtful eye as he scanned the wares the blond, brown-eyed man had ready. “Welcome! What’s your pleasure today?” the man asked forthrightly, as if we weren’t the first other souls he’d seen in over fifteen years.

  I noted he had bread and cheese on display. If he had extra-dimensional storage, which I was sure he did, that was a monotonous food source, and flasks of water were available, too…

  “That is a lot of clothing and leather goods, Ryin,” he murmured under his breath.

  “Doesn’t convert the higher notes,” I said to him, and he nodded, having seen the same thing.

  “We’ll be back, sir,” Briggs promised, and was there just the tiniest flicker of light in those eyes, as if something had suddenly woken up after so long a period of isolation?

  The last person here was an Archmage, the title given to those who made and sold magical components around here, ranked silver by the Scarabs she had setting out.

  All her herbs were still fresh. I shook my head in some disbelief, although it wasn’t impossible if preservation spells were applied repeatedly.

  Briggs eyed the racks of spell components and alchemical supplies. “Anything the alchemists might want in bulk?” he asked me quietly.

  “Plenty. There’s no unlimited reserve of the raw materials around like there used to be, amazingly enough. Even basic Scarabs are harder to make than before.”

  “We might be able to purchase all you might want for some time,” he pointed out softly. “The Mick specifically said that he doesn’t ever remember a true vendor ever selling out of anything.”

  “I’m aware, and while this isn’t unlimited funds, it is a lot of them… and she takes all Note sizes.”

  “Make the cube.”

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  I eyed the stone floor, and the wall that opened out to the larger cavern that these rooms had been built up in.

  At the touch of Shaping Stone, the stone turned into a circle in front of the short, prim woman in Sho archmage robes waiting patiently for us to come to her, as if that was the only reason we would be here. She glanced at the empty basin curiously, and then actually raised an eyebrow as the wall of her room flowed away and the floor poured down, forming a sluice down to a twenty-foot cube that actually had to empty out of the floor below.

  I tossed an Itemized square of cloth out of my Vest, and it settled smoothly and snugly on the floor of the cube down there.

  Briggs waited until everything was ready, then turned back to the archmage waiting there with eternal patience. “Good afternoon! My name is Briggs, Commander of the free military forces of Osteth here.”

  “Hello! How may I be of service to you today?” she replied mechanically.

  He didn’t ask for her name, and he kept his Source Aura leashed for the moment. Instead, he flipped out the first thick stack of MMD notes. “We’d like to cash these in please, prior to making some purchases.”

  She reached out and took the bundle, pausing for a moment. “You do not have enough room to carry all these coins,” she reported after a moment, eyeing him strangely.

  He simply gestured at the sloping stone basin waiting there. “If you could deposit the funds there, I am sure that you will find that I have plenty of room.” Just the tiniest pulse of Source Aura, changing the parameters.

  “Very well. Here are your funds.”

  And an absolute flood of pyreal coins materialized out of nowhere, pouring in a tinkling stream down that flowing ramp and into the cube formed outside the room, while I hastily set up a Prestidigitation going at VI+1 to perform the simple task of stacking those coins neatly as fast as they came down.

  In no time at all, a third of the cube was covered in neat rows of pale green coins, stacked perfectly tight in the constrained space.

  “How are we doing?” Briggs asked me, while I looked down at nearly three thousand cubic feet of pyreal, almost three hundred tons of goldweight.

  It was a completely nonsensical display of wealth. A literal dragon’s hoard, stacked nice and tight in a stone cube. Despite weighing less than half what true gold did, it was just an obscene amount of money.

  “Give her another one,” I said softly, and the floor warped and the wall faded away as I made up another pit to handle the overflow of what was coming.

  Briggs politely pulled out another stack of MMD’s and handed them over to be cashed in.

  Another clattering deluge of pyreal streamed into existence with magical speed and filled up the new cube to over two-thirds full.

  I calmly siphoned off the required amount for the third flow of coins to fit in the cube, about twenty million coins draining sideways into the second cube.

  “Again.”

  A third flow clinked its way down the flow, and magic rippled and stacked them perfectly solid in the first cube there, right to the limits of the spell which was coming.

  Briggs had to come over to look at it.

  “Damn,” he said, not sure he was really seeing what he was. “That is a LOT of goldweight,” he murmured, rather stunned at the sight.

  “Three hundred and fifty-two thousand goldweight,” I said softly. His hands creaked inside his gauntlets.

  “And you can Tapestry all of that…”

  I reached down to the cloth underneath all of that coinage, and applied the spell.

  There was just a shimmer, and then the coins were suddenly gone, as was the containing cube. Down in the pit of the floor below, the white cloth of the tapestry now displayed a woven picture of a tall cube brimming with gleaming pale green coins.

  “Burn a thousand goldweight a day for a whole year…” he murmured, as the cloth below folded into eighths, then rolled up into a long roll and was tugged up to my hand by Zeks.

  He stepped over to where like a mere four million or so pyreal coins were stacked in the second pit.

  “I was wondering about making some buys, but I’ve reconsidered my position on the matter,” he announced quietly.

  “If this is a windfall, best to use it all. Did I or did I not recall hearing from the scour teams about finding MMD notes in some of the housing chests they went into, dismissed as just paper at the time?” I asked.

  Briggs reached up to the bridge of his nose, and in the Markspace a blizzard of Utterly Top Priority orders went out to people all over Osteth, interrupting a whole lot of plans and standing orders with absolute urgency, based on reports from the Scour teams.

  The MMD’s used to start fires were now going to be sorely missed… sort of.

  “Twenty-two more to go for now,” Briggs said. “Why don’t you look at her stuff and make a shopping list.”

  “Already done.”

  Something in my voice made him look at me sharply. “What is it?” he said, almost afraid to ask.

  “She’s selling component Peas.” I lifted my hand up, thumb and forefinger rubbing together.

  “Those are… lightweight, compressed spell components, you need a special tool to break open?” he recalled, frowning slightly.

  “All of which broke at the Fall, scattered tons of flaming components all over the place, by the reports,” I confirmed. “So, I never got a close look at them. The archmage in Martine’s Chamber didn’t sell them anymore, presumably because Martine updated them. This woman was never updated, presumably because no Isparians ever interacted with her to update her.”

  “There’s something special about them?”

  “The reason you need a special tool to break them open is because they used goddamn Quintessence to make a Pea, Briggs.”

  Briggs blinked. “Quin...tessence?” He slowly turned around and stared at the neat rows of Scarabs, herbs, talismans, powders, and candles sealed up in their little green marble-sized spheres, either twenty Scarabs or fifty each of the other components visible there compressed into a little sphere weighing maybe an ounce. “Spatial AND temporal collapse without a resonance field effect?” he mumbled, seeing no distortion around the rows of neat green components. “Uruth and his philtres, isn’t that like… Legendary Alchemy?”

  “Uh huh. A verifiable Seventh Circle Alchemical effect,” I confirmed for him.

  Briggs rocked back on his heels. “What Valence to duplicate?” he asked calmly.

  “At least a IX, but I’m guessing X.”

  “Do you know the spells there?” I had a huge list of spells backloaded from Aelryinth, after all.

  “No, it has to be highest-end Empyrean Alchemy to do that. There’s not a single mage or alchemist in Dereth who recalls how to make peas. ‘Someone was making them’ is all they remember when they suddenly became available.”

  “So, they’re a look into the Empyrean System.”

  “And some pretty freaking complex interactions into temporal and spatial magic.”

  “How much do you need?”

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