The sewer stank, as it always did, but this time, Simon didn’t even wait until he was close enough to catch the attention of the carrion crawler. Instead, he used only a very small light spell to guide his feet on the familiar path, and as soon as he turned the corner and saw the bodies at the end of the channel moving slightly while the thing feasted on it, he muttered the word of lightning and sent electricity arcing along the sewage toward the thing.

The flicker of arcing electricity that followed was brief, and the smell of ozone lasted a little longer, for which he was grateful. It certainly smelled better than the shit and decay, but both were gone by the time he reached the end of the tunnel and found the still-quivering pile of corpses.

This was the first time that the slimy bastard didn’t climb up to the top of the tunnel to attack him. It was also the first time that he waded into the filthy water to see what it was he’d glimpsed last time.

Simon flinched as he stepped into the churning slime as it rose first to his ankle, and then to his knee as he waded over to the small mountain of bodies, and began to pull them off the stack one at a time.

“I’m going to burn these clothes when I’m done with them,” he muttered to himself. “Maybe my hands too.”

The corpses themselves were in a fairly advanced form of decomposition, and when he yanked on an arm or a leg to pull a body out of the way, as often as not, the rest of the body didn’t follow, which was somehow more disgusting than all the other disgusting things he was doing right now, like wading in sewage or touching dead bodies.

Each time it happened, he gagged, but it wasn’t until the third time that he actually threw up. “What could possibly be worth this,” he wondered aloud.

Simon wanted to quit, but not as much as he wanted to never do this again. So, instead, he plowed ahead, slowly clearing away the bodies, widening the stack as its height shrank. Part of him wanted to use force to make this easier and faster, but he hesitated.

He’d seen this whole place collapse before. He knew how fragile this arrangement was, and even as he moved the corpses around, he could hear the rusted grating creaking and screeching as the load against it shifted. It would be very easy for the whole thing to give away and send him tumbling into the darkness that lay beyond.

After two new minor light spells, several more minutes of messy digging, and one more round of vomiting, Simon finally saw what he was looking for: a glint of gold. It was wedged deep, but it was there, and he threw caution to the side as he went for it. Instead of moving bodies carefully aside a piece at a time, he leaned forward as far as he could to dig it out.

It was a fine plan, but it was no surprise when he sliped in the muck and gore almost immediately. His added weight to the pile that suddenly destabilized the rest of the mound, and just like that, he could hear the sound of rusted metal tearing as the whole thing slid toward the abyss.

Even as the darkness opened up around him, his hand closed around the golden cylinder, and he gripped it tight. If he fell into the darkness, he could easily blast his own head from his shoulders with a spell, but he wasn’t going to let that happen. Dying now would mean doing this again in some future life, and he was done digging through corpses.

So, instead, he yelled, “Oonbetit!” as he felt the whole mound starting to go, pushing himself bodily back toward the sewer.

There was no subtlety to this spell. It felt like a mule kicking him in the chest as he was lifted bodily out of the water along with a spray of body parts and thrown away from the corpseberg as it started to fall away into the dark. What followed was a feverish struggle as his fingers sought to find purchase on the slimy walls and the far ledge, but each time he found something to grab hold of, he fell away.

In the end it was neither his resources that saved him or his strength, it was the lack of water. With the blockage removed, the water had flowed very quickly for the first few seconds, but once that was over he was left at the bottom of the sewer channel with barely a trickle of water surrounding him, which was much too little to move his bulk.

Simon peeled himself off the ground, desperately wishing he knew the power word for water. He didn’t though, so he would have to live for this. As he made his way to the ladder and began to climb toward the light. He’d lost his bow, and probably other things in all of that, but he still had his sword, and more importantly whatever this golden cylinder was, and after he’d bathed for like an hour he was going to open it and investigate it.

Still, not even the magnetic pull of the languid jungle river that he’d enjoyed more than once before was enough to make him stop and investigate the thing. It looked like a scroll case of some sort but was sealed with what appeared to be molten lead. There might be writing, but he wasn’t sure. The thing was caked in grime.

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It was almost certainly cursed or worse. Simon wasn’t sure what that meant mechanically, but he suspected that whoever had thrown it away in a sewer wanted to make sure that it never saw the light of day again.

Simon knew something was wrong even before his head popped above the street level. He could hear screams, which weren’t a thing before. He’d never encountered a single living soul in the jungle level, and that anomaly made him stop his studying of the cylinder, and rush up the ladder even faster.

What he found was not the jungle, the river, or even the ruins. The level had disappeared, though he didn’t know why. Instead, he was back in Ionar, and it was burning the same as it ever was.

That was, interesting, concerning even, but not as concerning as the fact that his planned bath was going to need to be delayed. Simon looked to the erupting volcano in annoyance, and then cast his gaze around the street as he watched people flee by looking for some place to bathe.

He found his answer in a fountain a little ways up the street, and he started walking toward it with a purpose. Even though he was going against the streaming, screaming masses, he had no trouble reaching it. Because of the awful smell, all of them gave him a truly wide berth.

So, as the world ended for the residents of this beautiful cliffside city, he began to strip down, throwing each piece of his armor in the lukewarm fountain water as he went. By the time he was almost naked, the place was mostly a ghost town as they fled down the road toward the distant harbor. That left him plenty of time to soak while he tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Did I do anything on my last trip that might have cleared the ruins?” he asked himself as he sat beneath the spray in the waist-deep pool. The water was cool, but the night air was very warm, and it balanced out well enough.

“No, no, I definitely didn’t,” he said after he thought about it for a moment. The last time he’d gone up those temple stairs, he hadn’t done a single thing. He’d just been passing through because he didn’t want to try to fight his way through those horrid flowers again.

So what did it do? He wondered.

He thought back through his last run. He’d done a lot of stuff in levels after the temple, but they shouldn’t be able to effect it. Not unless there was some weird reverse causality at play.

So what did he do before that? He’d finally found out where the rat level was, which was the most minor change he could have imagined. That was it, though. He’d fought the Skeleton Knights the same as always and breezed right through the inn without talking to anyone.

“Was that the first time I left the sword there?” he wondered aloud. “No, because I couldn’t figure out how to pick it up safely for ages. So, that couldn’t have been it either.”

Finally, his eyes fell upon the scroll case. That was really the only change he’d made, actually before the missing level in time, that might have been major enough to affect it.

Simon carefully washed the debris clean off the outside and looked at it. The whole thing was beaten gold that had been decorated with death imagery in delicate bas reliefs that had already been damaged by how soft and ductile the gold was.

“If you want to seal something away forever, then why would you build it out of gold?” Simon asked dismissively. Stamped into the lead seal that oozed out of the two halves like they were some kind of thermos that overflowed, he found the words, “Do not think to open, even to destroy this. Better men than you have failed.”

“What an oddly specific warning,” Simon said quietly as he tried and failed to twist the thing open.

He shook it, and heard only one thing rattling around in there. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it definitely wasn’t a scroll.

He weighed his options for a moment. He could keep it sealed and find somewhere to hide it, or he could open it up, and if he didn’t like what he found he could always melt it closed again. He chose the latter option. He didn’t see the harm.

“Vosden,” he said as the volcano rumbled ominously in the background. The lava hadn’t reached this spot yet, but it was coming down the street. He would probably have to start getting dressed in his wet clothes in a little while.

As he spoke the word, the top melted off, letting Simon look inside for the first time. What he saw was… an orb? No, a crystal, maybe? It was oblong and bulbous, but it was hard to make it out in the darkness of the container.

He studied it for a moment, then upended the case like a Pringles can and dropped the thing into his hand. It was definitely a stone of some kind. It was heavy, too, and reminded him somewhat of a chestnut made out of malachite.

He shrugged and was about to put the thing back in the case since he couldn’t figure out what it was for when suddenly it bit him. Bite might have been the wrong word, but whether it was a stab or a sting, he felt a painful jolt into his flesh, and he dropped the thing immediately.

He tried to, at least. The stone stayed stuck to his hand, and it was only when he grabbed it in his right hand and pulled hard that it came loose. He couldn’t see what had happened, but what he could see was blood and lots of it, along with a series of small fresh wounds in his palm.