Beneath the rifted well lay neither a grand sacrificial hall nor the heavily guarded garrison they had expected.
What hit them head-on was the choking stench of smoke and sour rot, fermented underground for who knew how many years.
Following the half-collapsed stone stairs, the investigation team descended more than twenty meters on skeletal supports hastily assembled by Bi Ren Liang Mou. Before them stretched cramped, narrow platforms forcibly built in rings against the well walls. They were littered with rags, broken bones, hard fungal cakes, and a few makeshift panels that barely blocked the wind. The deeper they went, the denser the suffocating traces of a life barely clinging on became.
After turning another corner, their view suddenly opened up.
A massive black shaft, like a silent beast, squatted stubbornly in the very center of the shelter level. The ancient carvings along its walls had long since crumbled away, yet its depths still glimmered faintly. That radiance did not belong to the Star Spirits. It was ring after ring of lifeless, dim gray light. Every so often, the dark glow swept coldly upward from the bottom of the well, casting the mottled stone walls around it in a bone-chilling pallor.
The entire shelter level had been spread around this black well as precariously as walking on thin ice.
Some lay sprawled like corpses on crude skeletal beds. Some clutched shriveled fungus sacks and huddled in dark corners. Several clearly young Darklings hid behind torn cloth, exposing only half their deathly pale faces. There were very few armed guards. Everywhere they looked were maimed soldiers missing limbs and ordinary people starved down to skin and bone.
The instant the players and Star Spirits appeared at the entrance, the tension throughout the shelter level snapped taut.
A wounded soldier with one