The four of us felt very excited when we found a door that hadn’t been turned into melted slag. We had spent most of our time in this building finding empty room after empty room, so the idea that there might actually be something to take in the next room was exciting.

But we also didn’t get sloppy. We carefully investigated the area, looking for traps, and I used my soul-vision to investigate the room behind the door. Only after confirming that we couldn’t find any threats did we start investigating the door itself. We couldn’t find any ‘opening’ mechanism, the way the doors of the dimensional habitat facility had been opened with some sort of scanner, leaving us a bit baffled about how to open the door.

We also realized, after some testing, that these doors weren’t anywhere near as sturdy as the doors of the dimensional habitat facility. They were made of metal, but were much thinner. Perhaps it was because they didn’t need to potentially contain an escape attempt from extradimensional creatures, the Orthans hadn’t reinforced them as much?

Unfortunately, the walls were still made out of metal. Even though they weren’t as thick and sturdy as the walls of the Dimensional Habitat Facility, Sallia was still unable to punch them down - something we confirmed after Sallia spent a few minutes trying to simply remove the wall using her fists. While Sallia was capable of denting the wall, she couldn’t break it very easily, and she also had a hard time hitting the wall while also holding onto Sekundyrr and healing him.

Eventually, Anise and Felix took turns hammering the wall with spells, while Felix also used his attunement of metal to widen the hole in the wall. After bombarding the door for over an hour, they finally made a hole large enough for the four of us (and Sekundyrr) to step through.

We found ourselves staring at a row of… cages.

They looked like pet cages. If the Orthans had lived in a society where owning pets was normal, and where food and other resources were more abundant, I wouldn’t have thought much of the cages at all.

But as far as I knew, the Mages of the second Orthan empire hadn’t really owned pets. Most people of the time had either been slaves, and thus didn’t have the resources or time to take care of pets, or powerful mages who were more interested in studying magic than having any sort of ethical compass whatsoever. So I had no idea why there were a bunch of pet cages in the equipment manufacturing facility.

Surprisingly, however, it was Sekundyrr who knew what the cages were used for.

Breathing cages. Sekundyrr transmitted two different emotions - a mixture of anticipation, and disgust.

I looked at Sekundyrr, baffled, and the others did the same. Anise started preparing to create a light show and ask Sekundyrr what he was talking about, but before she could get started, Sekundyrr continued.

These cages let live outside without dying. Whatever goes wrong in my body when I contact the world is removed if inside. I didn’t know at first. Now, I can’t go anywhere without Red-haired girl healing me. Realize. Cages keep safe outside cell.

I blinked, and then looked at the cages again.

An image of Sekundyrr being dragged away from its home dimension in a ‘pet cage’ appeared in my mind.

I hadn’t thought much about how the Orthans transported creatures that were unable to survive outside of their home dimension into this dimension. But it was obvious some method of transportation had to be used. After all, Sekundyrr started dying almost the moment it wasn’t being healed by Sallia. While it was possible that the Orthans had some sort of healing attunement that let them transport creatures safely, it would definitely make transporting creatures from one dimension to another a very difficult logistical affair. Shaping didn’t seem to lend itself to healing very well if one didn’t understand the structure of the body they were healing, and it was naturally very time consuming and difficult to understand the biological structures of a creature from an entirely different dimension. Especially if their laws of physics were completely different from our own, meaning that one basically had to relearn how reality worked every single time a new dimension was contacted.

The solution appeared to be these ‘pet cages.’ I looked at the cages more carefully, and saw that many of them were labeled with numbers, such as ‘1’ and ‘3.’ None of the intact cages had a number higher than ‘5,’ although there were a few broken cages with the number ‘6’ written on them.

The Orthans had clearly made cages that matched the environment of a certain dimension, and then used them to transport creatures back to this dimension without the creatures dying in the process.

I did wonder whether all of the cages had actually been used, since some dimensions didn’t seem to have ever had living inhabitants. The unborn dimension, for example, had certainly never had any sort of living creature inside of it, since all of its dimensional laws were total nonsense. But ultimately, it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that we had finally found a better way to transport Sekundyrr around without tying up Sallia’s absorption essence and one of her hands.

I looked around for a moment, then grabbed a cage with the number 3 attached to it. Sekundyrr sent out the mental equivalent of a sigh, and then helped open the cage before crawling inside of it.

Sallia removed her hand from Sekundyrr, to see if the cages still worked after all these centuries of neglect. Luckily, much like the underground cities and tunnels, these cages didn’t seem to have deteriorated with time. Sekundyrr waited a few moments, before sending us the mental equivalent of a thumbs up.

Sallia picked up the cage, and our group continued moving.

I felt bad for Sekundyrr, but at the same time, it was definitely a relief that transporting Sekundyrr was now much easier. I was willing to help Sekundyrr escape, and I did hope that we could find a way to return it to its home dimension. But I also wanted to prioritize keeping our group as strong as possible in case we ran into other hostile creatures.

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Then, we continued exploring the facility.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find much else of use. We found one room that was filled with strange, broken suits, which Felix guessed was meant to keep Orthanoids alive in other dimensions (although it was hard to be sure), and another room filled with some sort of rotten food. None of us could figure out what it had originally been, and frankly, a single whiff of the sickly-sweet odor and mold that had built up for centuries was enough to dissuade me from getting any closer to the mysterious goop.

The other rooms we found were already emptied. There were a few rooms that looked like they might have had manufacturing facilities at one point - unfortunately, those had definitely been searched and completely emptied, just like most of the other rooms in the facility. I started to suspect that the three rooms we had found intact weren’t left behind because we were lucky - the previous group must have found a map of the facility, broken into the rooms that had valuable items in them, and completely ignored the rest of the facility. The only reason we got any use out of the abandoned rooms at all was because we were carting Sekundyrr around with us.

After finding nothing else of value in the facility, we left, and started heading towards the mystery building. We planned to hit it up before heading into the ruined palace and seeing if we could somehow cut off this world’s connection to the dimension of the black sun. It was unlikely to work, but… if we could do it, it would be a huge amount of Achievement. And it was probably also necessary if this world was to survive more than a few more decades. Based on what we had seen while making our way through the Wastes earlier, I seriously doubted this world was going to last long if nothing was done about the black sun.

Much like the area around the Equipment Production Facility, the area around the unknown building was cleared of traps, so we didn’t hold much hope for the contents of the building. And that concern was justified when we discovered that the name of the mystery building was ‘Farm 3,’ which hardly inspired confidence in its contents. A farm that hadn’t been maintained in centuries was probably just a plot of weeds at this point.

Just for the sake of being thorough, we still decided to check it out. We did need more food, even if I seriously doubted there was any inside of the building.

Sadly, my suspicions turned out to be correct. Farm 3’ was filled with several patches of dirt, none of which had a single plant growing in them. It was basically a building with nothing inside, and it felt like nothing so much as a huge waste of time.

By the time we finished searching Basic Farm 3, we were all tired, since we had explored two mostly empty facilities today. Instead of finding useful items, we had spent several hours on guard against traps and had found nothing interesting whatsoever. We decided to rest for the day. We helped Sekundyrr, so that it could get out of its cage for a while and stretch its legs. Sallia and I took turns healing it while it moved around. Then, we set up a watch order and turned in for the day.

The next day, we started moving directly towards the palace. After about an hour of travel, we started running into fireball traps again, indicating that this area hadn’t been cleared out yet. From that point onwards, our movement slowed down as we made extra sure that we didn’t trip anything we couldn’t handle. Something that proved to be very important, because Felix and Sallia started noticing new, weird traps as we got closer and closer to the ruined palace.

The first new trap we noticed was picked up by one of the mud balls that we were rolling in front of us. Rather than triggering a giant ball of ridiculously hot fire, like usual, a ball of lightning erupted from the rock we had triggered, which greedily licked the area around it with tendrils of lightning for several seconds before it deactivated itself.

This was our first warning that fireball traps weren’t the only thing we would encounter here.

After that, we ran into some sort of acid trap, which melted the ball of mud we had been rolling in front of us to find traps and forced us to take some time to make a new one. Felix almost got some acid on him as well, which caused us to start putting a much greater distance between ourselves and the ball of mud we used to find traps. After wading through the acid trap area, we ran into a pitfall trap, of all things.

Which, once again, forced us to make a new ball of mud.

I couldn’t help but wonder just why the Orthans had placed so many traps around the ruined palace. Had the traps been set up after the black sun had come to this world, or had the Orthans actually had the wisdom to realize something might go horribly wrong while exploring other dimensions, and made some sort of preparation to guard the area? Or did they just expect that only slaves would be traveling on the ground, or something? Given how many other things the second Orthan empire had accomplished, it genuinely wouldn’t surprise me if they had some sort of flight spell that was commonly used by the Mages of their society.

Luckily, with Sallia and Felix’s eyesight and our trusty ball of dirt and mud to test the area for traps, we managed to reach the palace walls unscathed, even if it took much longer than anticipated. It wasn’t particularly hard to get into the palace itself: there were giant gaping holes in the wall. I had no idea whether they were the result of some sort of spell, erosion from the black sun, or something else entirely. Regardless, the palace wall looked more like swiss cheese than a proper wall at this point. It was a miracle the whole thing was still holding itself together and hadn’t just collapsed in on itself.

We snuck through one of the gaps in the wall, and then got our first good look at the palace. from the inside.

I had expected many things inside of the palace. Particularly, I had expected some sort of ruins that were once filled with opulence and decadence. I had imagined silk tapestries and valuable vases and ornaments decorating the interior.

The inside of the palace wasn’t anywhere near as luxurious as I had expected it to be. The first thing we saw after crawling through the hole in the wall was a giant row of metal stakes, all driven into the ground. Each of them was covered in alteration essence, and I got the same feeling from them that I had gotten from the rooms in the dimensional habitat facility.

While I didn’t know exactly what was being changed, I knew that the laws of reality were somewhat different in the air immediately surrounding each metal stake. I got the feeling that the laws related to energy, or perhaps essence, were being changed somehow, but I couldn’t get any more information than that. I still hadn’t figured out how to mess with dimensional laws using alteration essence, and whatever was being done here was a level above normal dimensional alteration, so it was impossible for me to figure out what was going on beyond the very basics.

The alteration-essence filled metal stakes lined the sides of the hallway we found ourselves in, with a metal stake driven into the ground right next to the wall about two meters apart from each other. They were connected by a thick metal cord that was wrapped around the top of each metal stake. The metal cord had started to fall apart over the centuries, fraying and collapsing as though it were made of twine instead of thick iron.

The rest of the hallway was more in line with my expectations. It had clearly been a nice carpet at some point in the past, even if it was rotted and decayed now. There were a few decorations on the walls that looked like they had been paintings at one point.

However, most notable of all was the taste of space being disrupted in the area. It lay in the palace like a thick, suffocating blanket laying on my tongue. As we took our first steps into the palace, I became absolutely certain of my earlier guesses.

“I’m sure now. Whatever is connecting us to the dimension of the black sun is in this building,” I said.