The first thing they did was return to the school to see if any of the kids were unclassed. If they did find any bloodstones, they would want to know if they could give them to someone who would benefit the most from them. Kids were by far the most likely to still be unclassed by now.
None of the Gilroy Crossing kids were unclassed, other than the kids who were under eight years old. That wasn't a surprise, since they had fought their way out of a monster horde. Their parents would have given them classes before sending them off.
Among the Bautista kids, they had more success. Many of the pre-teen kids were unclassed. It was a general rule of thumb that parents didn't give their kids classes before age sixteen unless there was a pressing need. By the time they were teenagers, they would generally rebel by going out to find classes themselves, but that wasn't the end of the world.
The principal was skeptical when they suggested they might be able to find new bloodstones for them underground. Josh had to admit her arguments were disheartening. The pit was relatively new; it had been formed after the Fall of the Tower and the death of humanity. That meant that even if they did find anything down there, it was unlikely to be a hundred year-old bloodstone of some obscure class.
Still, there was nothing lost by trying, so they headed off to their delve. They left the very same day, when the kids from Gilroy Crossing were coming in to settle into their new accommodations. None of them wanted to lose any time.
They took an elevator down into the pit with a number of other delvers. Josh noted that they were the only ones who were obviously armed. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not. If there were no monsters in the pit, would that make it more or less likely that there would be bloodstones?
He had quite a while to think about this as they were lowered down into the darkness on their rickety wooden platform. It was a smooth ride, and the platform was secured by a solid steel chain, but he couldn't help but feel apprehensive. Every creak of the wood or sway of the platform set his nerves on edge. He was far from the power level where he would be able to survive a fall of this height.
Josh didn't know how far they traveled down. He didn't even pay enough attention to know how long it took. Every once in a while he would hear the zip of rope nearby. Sometimes he even caught sight of people diving straight into the pit, their only safety line being a rope connecting them back to the surface. It seemed that some people preferred to get down faster than an elevator.
Josh wondered about that. Not about how. Enough time had passed since the reset that a reasonably ambitious person could be level 30 or so by now without taking dangerous risks. They could easily have a few abilities that let them survive a fall of miles by this point. Off the top of his head, Josh knew a handful of Mage Gunner spells that could do it, though they weren't part of the standard advancement. Josh didn't know if Mary had bothered to learn them.
His question was more why. If there were no monsters down here, nothing but rocks and ore, then what was the point of rushing? Surely all the good mining spots had already been found and claimed. He doubted that there was any need for racing each other at this point.
Despite the size of the pit, the light from the sun soon faded away. The others on the platform, clearly more experienced than Josh and his party, lit oil lamps on the corners of the elevator. They also had helmets with electric torches, though they left them off. The result was a tiny pool of light descending into an infinite expanse of darkness.
Ruth shivered and clutched her oversized hammer tighter. The rune-chains glowed white, and she received a few looks from the other delvers on the platform. Not too many, though. Enchanted weapons were rare, but not unheard of. They likely assumed she was a spoiled rich girl who had received a gift from her parents. Which... wasn't all that wrong, Josh realized.
Eventually, they were within sight of the pit's floor, and Josh's worries were washed away.
Josh had assumed that the pit would be bare. After all, it had been blasted out of the ground by the Eight Immortals and a particularly difficult dracobeast. He had seen high-tier battlegrounds before. In his youth, he had seen the Eye of the Deep, a spot in the ocean where powerful uncontrolled magic had pushed back the entire ocean in a wide area, exposing the seabed for a hundred yards in every direction. It had faded eventually, the ocean returning, but he still remembered the sheer power of that sight. Of a battle so destructive that nature itself had fled.
The floor of the pit was covered in a mushroom forest, with caps the size of houses and stalks wider than his outspread arms. Most of them were the ghostly white of fungi that never saw the sun, but he also saw tall and thin bioluminescent mushrooms, and the floor of the pit was covered in a moss that grew so thick it could be mistaken for grass. In the light of the mushrooms, it looked blue, but the more natural light of the torches revealed it to be green.
There were paths cut through the mushroom forest. Their own elevator came down on an empty space of stone that had been cleared for its own use. Josh and his friends piled out in a daze, even as the others pushed out with far less patience.
He looked around, still lost in his own head. There were glowing spots in the air. Spores, he realized, from the mushrooms. He followed one with his eyes as it fell. When it touched the ground, it visibly buried itself, and he could see it beginning to grow a new mushroom stalk.
“The Jungle is down here?” he asked, surprised.
One of the more experienced delvers cocked her head. “Yeah. You didn't know that? Why did you think we were down here?”
“For the metal,” he said, oddly offended. “No one mentioned a thing about mushroom harvesting!”
She shrugged. “I mean, it's both. They'll be taking up piles of rock and ore all day. But a lot of us are here for the plants.” She nodded at a large glowing bush. It looked like a flowering fern, with some of its stalks glowing. “That thing can be used to make a healing potion. Do you know how rare it is to find natural materials that can be used in potions without class abilities?”
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He did, in fact. People with the Alchemist class could extract magic from almost anything and use it to infuse their potions. But since the Alchemist class didn't exist any more, they had to get by with more difficult methods. Among other things, that meant rarer ingredients were needed just to make lower-quality potions.
What could a true Alchemist make with this? Josh thought to himself sadly.
In Gilroy Crossing, Mayor Vashti had wanted an Alchemist. She'd already had a lower-case alchemist, someone who knew how to mix a few different magical herbs together, but it was nowhere near the level someone could get with the actual class. It was a [Crafter] class, so theoretically Josh's Woodcrafter bloodstones should have been enough to let someone advance into that class. If so, they hadn't found the right advancement path before the attack came. They had been too careful, too slow.
“Wot about monsters?” Mary asked. “If the Jungle's down here making everything grow and glow, you've gotta have monsters.”
“Insects only,” the delver said. “And the scouts kill them all before they can become a threat.” She shrugged. “Besides, we can handle a few low-level bugs. We're mostly Mages.”
Josh realized she was right. Normal animals in the Jungle could become infused with magic and begin gaining levels, though nothing about the process was well understood. Typically, however, that was rare. Most monsters came out of the dungeons the day before the reset. Dungeons somehow always had a full stock of monsters, but they could only escape when the seals became weakest, on the very last day of the year. If you cleared out every monster in an area, the dungeons would just release more. You had to destroy the dungeon itself to be sure an area was safe. That was what they did with the Burn Line around the City.
But there were no dungeons down here. He had never heard of one appearing underground. Or rather, had never heard of an entrance appearing underground. Was that the Tower, making sure that the dungeons could always be accessed? No one knew the precise relationship between the dungeons and the Tower.
I'll bet the elf would have known, Josh thought. Maybe he could have gotten more information out of him before killing him. Then again, it was little more than blind luck that he managed that, so he wasn't going to go double-thinking his choices now.
“Are there any tunnels?” Ruth asked, smiling at the delvers. “You know, a twisting labyrinth of passages hiding danger and treasures?” She said it like a joke, but she still leaned forward eagerly.
The delver laughed. “Sure.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “There's no one digging in that direction right now, but there's plenty of tunnels. They've found good stuff before.”
“Thanks!” Ruth called. She pulled her giant hammer off her back and literally skipped forward, happy to have found a plan.
The rest of them thanked the delvers and followed after Ruth.
“So, you know,” Josh said, in a deliberately conversational tone. “There's no guarantee we'll find anything down here. This is more of a test of my Stonesense than real hope for anything good.”
Darius nodded and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “Indeed. I suspect that these tunnels have long since been mined out of anything useful. That is why they are abandoned.” He paused as they passed by a glowing mushroom that was big enough and bright enough that it was hard to look at. “Although we might get lucky and find a handful of gems that were missed.”
“I knoow,” Ruth whined. “But we might find something! Besides, even if we don't, it's good practice!” She gripped her hammer tighter and grinned. Josh could imagine what kind of “practice” a level 34 Rune Warrior wanted.
Ruth had spent most of her life forced into the Healer role by her father. From her complaining, they all knew that she almost never advanced beyond the Mender class. Her father kept her close, kept her safe. The closest she was allowed to danger was typically the field hospitals near the Burn Line. She had never even killed a monster herself until this reset.
Josh wondered how much more Ruth would have flowered if she'd had a chance to fight like she wanted to. Or maybe the reason she was so obsessed with being allowed to fight was because her father had kept her from it for so long.
Mary walked casually, her hands behind her head. The grass-like moss crunched under her feet, sending up small puffs of pollen and spores that glowed in the light of the mushrooms. “I don't see what you're thinking to find down here, love. It's not as though the pit was here in the Old World. No one came down here before the Eight.”
Ruth raised a finger as if she was making an excellent point. “Ah-ha! But they came here basically right after they beat the Tower, right?”
“Within a week, I think,” Josh said. He hadn't visited the village's museum yet. He didn't know the full details of the timeline. “A month at most.”
He knew more from the other direction. The Eight had descended from the Tower, their last wish having made them immortal. Everyone else in the world was dead, so they had used the Mechanist’s Cradles left behind to start growing a new generation of humanity. There were a hundred pods, and it took them a while to grow a full baby from DNA samples. So the Eight had spent their time flying around the nearby area, blasting anything that looked like it could be a threat. The dracobeast at San Juan Bautista had apparently been one of the worst. Hence the giant pit in the ground.
“That means that the monsters didn't have time to trash the town completely,” Ruth pointed out. She was walking backwards so that they could see her giant grin. “There might be treasures that got buried when the town fell into the pit! Maybe even bloodstones!”
Josh blinked. He had only been half paying attention to what she was saying. He had already dismissed it as nonsense and wishful thinking. But her logic... actually made sense. After all, he had found his Woodcrafter bloodstone in the middle of the Jungle, in a building that had miraculously been untouched by monsters due to a lucky break with an electric fence.
Plenty of things had survived since the Old World. Eighty years was a long time, but not impossibly long. There were still buildings standing that protected treasures from weather and monsters. Yes, monsters hunted out bloodstones preferentially, as they were something that made them stronger. But if monsters were rare down here, then any theoretical lost bloodstone could remain safe for decades.
“All right,” he said, cautiously. “I'll give you that it's possible. Still probably gonna be disappointed, though.”
“I'm willing to take that risk,” she said, as firmly as if he was suggesting they fight a dragon.
Which was their end goal, wasn't it? So maybe she already had the right mindset for that.
It didn't take them long to reach the pit's wall. The elevator had let them down pretty close, it was just that walking through a glowing mushroom forest had slowed them down. Josh had seen some pretty interesting things, but even he had to pause at that.
The wall was covered in moss and slime. Some of it glowed, some of it extended tendrils to try and draw them closer. It didn't seem like any of it was intelligent, or even strong enough to be considered a real monster. He had faced a Fungal Colossus before. It hadn't been fun for anyone involved.