"Mr. Hamilton, if not for you and Gina, I can hardly imagine how we would have gotten through rooms like this. Perhaps we could only have chosen to reopen the door and take another route, but then there would be no telling how much farther we would have had to go."
Madam Gustav praised them, briefly checking Gina's condition and confirming that the Pink Dragon Young Lady merely needed rest:
"You support Gina first. We'll keep moving. If the Skeleton Tailor was not mistaken just now, the next room is the Life Furnace room. It counts as a Safe Room too, so we can rest again."
"We've gone through too few rooms. I'm afraid we'll have to come back out later to gather materials before we can activate the Furnace."
The Witch carrying the small bucket said worriedly, though she was still delighted that they had found the Furnace so smoothly:
"Let's rest first. Usually, we can only find a room where we can rest temporarily every fifteen rooms. This time, we found one much earlier."
Old Madam Gustav still went to open the door. Since Shade had a "Heart of the Earth Furnace" beneath his own home, he imagined that the "Life Furnace" would likewise be an enormous Furnace, except perhaps one made more of Flesh.
But Shade was wrong.
The new room was still illuminated by dark red light. At the center of the chamber, whose ceiling was at least twenty meters above the ground, a regular dodecahedron formed from twelve engraved Red Bronze cast-iron plates floated in the air. Each face bore ancient runes representing different Flesh Organs.
Countless spiderweb-like blood vessels extended from beneath the dodecahedron, connecting it to a Swimming Pool-sized Blood Pool on the floor. Above the dodecahedron floated a ring of thirteen blood-red