Darkness pressed in from every side, heavy and damp like wet soil. He ran barefoot across shifting planks that cracked and splintered, cutting into his bare soles. Distorted laughter echoed around him, but then it turned into his mother’s voice, soft at first, singing an old lullaby. But the cheerful tune twisted with every step he took, slowly turning into miserable sobs.
He glimpsed her standing in a kitchen that wasn’t theirs, face hidden by shadows. He reached for her hand, but she stepped back, her sobs cutting him worse than the sharpest blade.
“I’m trying,” he gasped, words swallowed by the dark. “I’m coming home, I swear!”
But the more he ran toward her, the farther away she drifted.
Suddenly, the floor beneath his feet gave way, and he was falling. The first floor passed by in a blur, a ceiling of translucent crystal rushing past his head.
No, that’s impossible, he thought as a feeling of deep horror ran through him, I can’t be going even deeper.
But yet another crystal ceiling passed as he fell ever further down into long forgotten depths of Tenjou.
He twisted, clawing at empty air as floors of dull crystal flickered by. Numbers etched in the crystal flashed past - 9, 10, 11 - each one a promise he’d never make it back up. He glimpsed his mother above him one last time, pale face streaked with tears, her eyes filled with a deep sorrow that would never go away.
“No!” he cried, then jerked awake with a strangled gasp, drenched in cold sweat. His chest heaved as he blinked into the darkness and it took his foggy brain a long, panicked moment to realize where he was. It was only when he fed Ki into his eyes and stared at the diagram on his lap that he realized he must have fallen asleep in the library.
He made to push himself up, but as soon as he moved, the pain came rushing in. There was barely a part of his arms that was free of scrapes and bruises. As he shifted, his tunic pulled at the dried blood on the back of his shoulder. His legs felt like they were filled with metal, his joints creaking like rusted hinges.
The sleep hadn’t refreshed him one bit. In fact, he felt considerably worse than before. Every part of him wanted to just lay there, but he knew there were things to be done. He’d been running out of time already and had no clue for how long he’d slept.
The sound of coughing from the hall reminded him that Nika was there and needed to be taken care of, which was finally enough of a push for him to get off his ass. Still, getting up was the work of slow determination. Dario was grunting and groaning like a dying deer as he pushed himself up against the wall, feeling like it took every ounce of his strength and willpower to do so.
He limped to the hallway, the echoes of a single step followed by a dragging boot and a hiss of pain following where he walked. He rounded the corner to find that Nika was squirming restlessly in her sleep, drenched in sweat just like he was.
“Hey,” he said softly as he put a hand to her shoulder, “it’s just a dream.”
Her eyes opened and she shot up, suddenly pushing him away with a gasp. He gently forced her down again.
“Easy. You took some nasty wounds. Better to stay put for now.”
She coughed and he handed her a waterskin, from which she drank carefully, wetting her cracked lips.
“Where are we?” she rasped.
“In the hidden basement. Feeding empathy into the crystal unlocked a hidden place, just like we thought. That was a bit of luck, at just the right time too.”
“You dragged me here?”
He nodded.
“How long?”
“Not sure, come to think of it. Half a day maybe? Could be a bit more. I bandaged your wounds and fed you two healing pills, but you don’t look like you’ll be winning any races yet. How do you feel?”
She paused for a moment, blinking down at her body as if it would answer the question for her. She tried to push herself up again, then let herself sink back with a wince.
“Like I fell down Mount Haku.”
Her stomach growled, so Dario warmed up some soup which she ate greedily while he caught her up on what he’d found here.
“Gathering more information is certainly a sound choice. We need answers more than anything else. I am not so obstinate to realize that a drastic change in tactics is required. Those two defeats have… thoroughly humbled me.”
She was looking down at her hands with a grimace and Dario would have said she looked completely defeated, if it wasn’t for that spark of anger. It was clear from the hardness in her eyes, from how deep her fingernails dug into her palm as she clutched her hands into a fist, that she had not yet given up. But soon enough, she snapped out of it.
“I believe I would like to see this library. Could you, ah, give me a hand?”
She seemed embarrassed as he put her arm over his shoulder and supported her on the way into the library, where he’d prepared a cot of sorts where she could be more comfortable. Her next request, of course, was to stack a pile of scrolls beside her. He turned back to his diagram and the memory crystals as she began to read the scrolls.
“Oh, and Dario?”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you. Truly. Without you, I would be dead. Or worse. I owe you a debt and I won’t forget it.”
“Sure. Any time.”
He didn’t get why she was making such a big deal of it. As if he’d ever just leave her lying there to be eaten by beasts or taken over by parasites. Besides, if she was out of the picture, who was going to fight that ridiculous monster? It damn sure wasn’t going to be him.
Frowning down at the diagram again, he tried to remember what he’d realized before dozing off. There was some conclusion he’d come to, one that felt kind of obvious… He ran his finger along the lines of the technical drawing, focusing on the two black shapes that had many corners, just like a crystal.
His eyes widened and he scanned the library again. At the far end, half-buried behind a stack of rotted crates, he spotted a bulky shape draped in sagging tarp. That had to be it. He crossed the room and yanked the cover free, coughing and backing away as dust filled the air.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Beneath the rotting tarp and dust was the familiar device: smooth black stone, faint inlays along its base, and three shallow sockets, the center one just the right size for the crystal.
“Yes! This has to be it!”
Nika looked up curiously from her scrolls.
“This is why I couldn’t get the crystals to work by themselves, they need this device. Just like in the testing rooms, only I’m hoping this time it’ll show what’s in the crystals,” he explained.
Dario pulled the memory crystal from his pocket and clicked it into the center. Nothing happened, so he took a closer look. Flanking the crystal were two crystals of a different kind, but one that he recognized immediately: Ki batteries.
He placed a hand over the first and let a trickle of light Ki flow into it. The stone lit up faintly, giving off a dim pulse.
Still working, though its capacity seemed to be messed up. It could only take a trickle at a time. He shifted to the second, feeding it the same slow stream as a test, which resulted in the same dim glow.
“This might take a while,” he muttered as he sat back down with a wince.
He decided to look over the other scroll he’d picked out while he absently sent two thin streams of light Ki streaming from his fingers, one to each battery. It had caught his eye because of the depictions of various plants and seeds on its container.
‘Discoveries in Aspect Splicing’ seemed to be the title, written in large letters with so many decorative flourishes that he could hardly read it. Most of the images seemed to show cross-sections of seeds and stems, though it also included diagrams of large and complex-looking instruments that used plant Ki. It took him a good while to begin making sense of it, running his finger along the text as he made out the strangely written words one by one, but then something clicked.
“Wait a minute,” he breathed, brows rising as his eyes flicked between two images, arrows and complex patterns connecting different seeds. “Combining plants? Is that what this is about?”
He sat up straight and pulled the scroll further down, eyes now taking in the long page with a newfound hunger. It kept going in lengthy detail about the process, which apparently required a certain type of instrument to ‘extract and infuse Ki at the smallest level’ and would work only on seeds, never entire plants.
Only when he got all the way to the bottom did the author talk more generally about his conclusions, writing that ‘The limiting factor seems to be an addition of only two aspects to a seed, which we have never managed to carry over without a loss of intensity. However, further study of seeds of older plants or plants raised on Ki-rich environments on upper floors is needed.’.
He looked around the library again, quickly concluding that there was no device like the one described in the scroll in the room. Judging by the size it should have, it wouldn’t be anywhere else either, so he let that be for now. In the meantime, the Ki batteries seemed to have filled up, so he went ahead and put a crystal in the intended slot.
“Alright,” he muttered. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The altar sparked to life with a pulse of light. Dario stepped back as a jittering projection formed on the wall. Something was wrong with this crystal; the colors were smeared, the image flickering. A half-covered face laughed and then vanished. A tree shedding leaves. Then a pair of hands weaving something. Then nothing.
He frowned, trying another one.
The next showed only a short image: a swirl of lights, children shouting happily in some kind of festival. Another crackled with sound but no image, only muffled voices and a long, slow sob. The one after that flickered with snatches of memory: someone counting seeds, a woman brushing her hair, two people arguing in a dialect Dario didn’t understand.
The fifth crystal gave nothing at all. But the sixth glowed brighter than the rest and when it started, the image finally held.
A man’s face stared back from a worn mirror. His skin was gaunt and grey, cheeks hollow, lips cracked. Eyes so dark and sunken they made a shiver run down Dario’s spine. The man blinked slowly, then began to speak.
“I am Saigo,” the man said, voice dry as ash. “Last of the folk that lived in this wretched shelter. In all likelihood, the last living soul of the Asomatous Floor. A floor so long forgotten that even the gods have stopped watching.”
Dario exchanged a look with Nika, then both stared breathlessly at the bright projection as the memory played out.
“I speak now because, harrowing though our story may be, it should not be forgotten. If the living ever return to this floor, if this place is ever found again… let it not be silent.”
There was a short flicker and crackle and, for a moment, Dario thought the projection would fail, but then it went on.
“It may well be that these memories will be buried along with our corpses. Perhaps that would even be for the best. But in case someone is listening to this, if some poor souls have made their way to this forgotten floor… Let then these memories serve first and foremost as a warning. The parasites are as devious as they are resilient. Do not underestimate them.”
The sound and image distorted for a bit, the man in the image seeming to move and do something to the device he must have used to record the memory, before it corrected itself.
“Once again I state for the record: my name is Saigo. Tenth generation born beneath the stone of the Asomatous Floor. I record this and foremost not for remembrance, but as warning.”
“The Great Plague took place long ago. What I’m about to share with you are the stories passed on from generation to generation. As I’ve been told, it all began in the outer wilds where beasts roamed unchecked. The first signs were small. Tame creatures going feral, reacting with unnatural fear or rage. At first, no one cared. Such things happened. Life went on.”
“But one day, something changed. Though it was not known at the time, the parasites had begun to change, feeding more slowly and spreading more rapidly, careful to keep their hosts alive. But within the beast population, they were never more dangerous than the beasts themselves.”
Saigo paused as a small cough turned into a longer coughing fit, after which he recovered with a drink of water.
“It’s said a researcher was the first human host, though no one ever proved it. Whenever the crossing may have occurred, it happened in silence, and with it, the plague truly began.”
Dario and Nika exchanged a look as the scene shifted to forest silhouettes, a human form leaning over a beast’s corpse, an indistinct wound at the back of a neck.
“The parasites learned quickly. They were no longer beasts that tore their hosts apart. They lived inside them, waiting. Hiding their marks behind scarves, staying out of trouble. A sharp healer might have spotted strange fluctuations of the mental Ki, but only if they were to look closely, and most never had cause to.
By the time anyone noticed, it was already too late. People became frightened and paranoid when the truth finally came out. The parasite didn’t just feed and spread, but it divided. Clans turned inward. Disciples accused one another. Entire sects went silent overnight. Even the Ki arts that this floor had once been known for themselves became suspicious, for those techniques based on the Ki of the Heart were now the cursed tools of the parasites.”
Dario hadn’t really given much thought to the nature of the parasites or how not just a city but an entire floor had fallen. It did make sense that it would play out like that, except for one thing.
“Where were the advanced cultivators in all of this?” he said, frowning. “I get that they’re not easy to deal with, but surely a team of Ambers could wipe the parasites out by the dozens?”
Nika was nodding slowly, thinking it through, but before she could speak, Saigo continued.
“It was the lack of cooperation that delayed an effective response. By the time cultivators had developed good detection mechanisms and fighting tactics, the parasites had already amassed an army of beasts and men. The eldest of them had grown strong, became leaders in battle that specialized in certain emotions, using advanced techniques that employed Ki of the Heart. Losses piled up as pitched battles were fought day after day, until a few of the Great Clans agreed on a decisive change in strategy: containment.
The Clays of course could never make it up to the higher floors, but the Great Clans had lost many in battle already. So they decided to cut their losses, gathering all their Talcs and Ambers and rushing up the lifts. All bridges and platforms were shattered once they were out. The infected would die down here, and the curse with them.”
“So it was true.” Nika had a look of horror on her face as she muttered under her breath. “I thought that… No, perhaps I simply did not want to believe. But it can no longer be denied. The Houjo clan must have been involved in the abandonment of this floor.”
