They wove their way through the city streets, toward the crashed pyramid. It was propped up at a twenty-five degree angle on what likely used to be buildings, creating an easy path up onto the side of the pyramid and a far more gentle incline on the highest side.
Jie followed Pan Tian up the rubble and onto the highest side of the pyramid. The dim light of their lanterns illuminated worn, ancient hieroglyphs carved into the stone.
Ithilix and Xue followed them up and they walked upon the pyramid. The gentler slope made it a relatively easy walk but the pyramid was enormous and huge chunks of its surface were missing. That, combined with all of them trying not to make too much noise, made it a slower journey than it otherwise would've been.
They crept along the surface of the pyramid and made it to a hole deep enough in the stone to breach the interior. Pan Tian climbed down into it, using her claws of light to find a grip on the stone. Jie followed her, relying on her superior strength to make climbing easier. She kept her eyes open and scanned everything around them with her spirit sense as best she could, not willing to let her guard drop even for a moment. As she climbed down, a loose rock crumbled beneath her grip, showering Pan Tian with dust and debris.
"Watch it," Pan Tian said.
"Sorry," Jie said.
Pan Tian paused, and Jie wondered if the older girl had discovered a threat of some kind...
Then, Pan Tian sneezed. The sound echoed in the darkness and they continued down.
Ithilix strolled down the walls of the hole behind Jie as though out for a leisurely walk and utterly defying gravity while carrying Xue in her arms. Xue looked over the hole and the others like an emperor overseeing his kingdom. Jie felt his deep sense of satisfaction at being spared the mundane task of climbing thanks to Ithilix radiating through their bond.
"Smug little cat," Jie muttered.
Xue looked her up and down and yawned. Ithilix scratched the side of his neck, and he gave a contented mrowr.
"You could at least pretend like climbing is difficult for you," Pan Tian said.
"This one doesn't see the point of that," Ithilix said and scratched Xue's side as she continued to defy gravity, her feet easily adhering to the walls.
They made it down to the bottom of the hole, the floor of which was like stained glass with veins of a darker material running through it. They walked along the surface of it until they found a large crack where a section of wall had broken apart, creating an opening deeper into the building. Pan Tian slipped inside and Jie followed her. The darkness within was almost total apart from their lanterns.
"We can probably risk a little more light in here. If we find more gaps in the walls, we'll have to turn it back down," Pan Tian said as she dialed up the light on her lantern.
Jie and the others copied her, revealing more of the chamber they found themselves in.
Noctilith corpses littered the dusty floor with huge chunks of their exoskeletons ripped apart or sliced in two. More hieroglyphics covered the walls, better preserved than those outside. Large metal pipes ran along the ceiling high above with the occasional much larger cylinder around them, which looked oddly similar to capacitors.
They walked deeper into the pyramid with Pan Tian leading the way and checking for traps. The floor was tilted on its side, as was the entire pyramid, but though the stone was smooth and easy to slip on, the angle wasn't extreme enough to make walking too difficult.
Ithilix had no difficulty whatsoever. Something that was starting to make Jie jealous.
Their footsteps echoed around them as they traveled through an endless maze of corridors. It reminded Jie of the catacombs at the start of the dungeon.
Jie scanned with her spirit sense and looked around them as best she could, but the long shadows could hide any manner of things. Once again, she found herself wishing she was more skilled with using her spirit sense. Particularly when it came to finding creatures that veiled their auras.
"Do you sense anything, Ithilix?" Jie whispered.
"The design of this place interferes with this one's senses. There are traces of treasure on almost every surface. Particularly gold in the hieroglyphs. This one finds it difficult to sense through the noise," Ithilix said.
"Well, we can't count on you to find everything for us. We'll work our way up and see what we can find," Pan Tian said. She marked the map she carried as they walked. Something Jie was grateful for as she didn't like the idea of being stuck endlessly wandering the corridors.
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***
They continued in silence, broken only by their footfalls.
The corridors led them in every direction with frequent dead ends causing them to double back. Several rooms were filled with sarcophagi. Though most were broken and empty. Pan Tian used a scroll of wisdom on a few of them. Each one she identified cursed whoever opened it with a disease, desiccation, dehydration, death, and eventual reanimation.
As they had no way to break the curse upon the chests without triggering it, they left the sarcophagi alone and moved on.
They came to a massive, square room with doorways on all four sides and an enormous circular shaft going through the floor and ceiling. Other floors were visible above and below them and still more were lost in darkness. Thick metal pipes and what looked like tracks lined the walls with webbing crisscrossed in the shaft above and below them.
Jie felt several presences through her spirit sense. She cycled lightning step and qi armor as four noctilith flew up from below. She sent out a chain finger of light attack and fried all four in one hit. They spasmed in the air and dropped down, trailing smoke as they fell and smashing into the sides of the shaft with heavy thunks before eventually landing somewhere in the darkness far below them with meaty thuds that echoed up the shaft.
"Let's hope that doesn't attract more of them," Pan Tian said, "Ithilix, can you scout for stairs or something? Run back to us if you come across anything you can't easily handle."
"This one can do that," Ithilix said. She ran along the walls and metal pipes, slipping into and back out of each of the other doorways and doing a quick scout of the floor above and below them before returning.
"This one found stairs, in the chamber on the right. But you will not like climbing them," Ithilix said.
"Is there a better option?" Pan Tian asked.
"Not that this one found," Ithilix said.
"I wish I could just walk on walls like you do. Ugh... alright. Let's be careful. We've come a long way. We don't need anyone dying because they got careless walking around this stupid pit," Pan Tian said.
They walked along the edge of it, which was more than broad enough for all of them, and into the chamber Ithilix advised. From there, they found a stairway tilted up, forming a steep incline with each step angled so that slipping and falling backward would be all too easy to do.
Pan Tian groaned but led the way upward, her claws of light digging into the wall beside her to keep from sliding backward.
"Why is this bothering you so much?" Jie asked as they climbed, "The tower was much worse."
Pan Tian shuddered. "Don't remind me," she said.
Ithilix walked behind Jie, carrying Xue up the stairs without any effort. He purred softly and looked even more smug than last time.
Although the incline of the stairs seemed at first to be nothing more than a barely irritating inconvenience, it was revealed to be far more dangerous when Pan Tian found one trap after another. Each one was all too easy to overlook or trigger. Especially if someone slipped.
But they were careful and made it up without incident. They continued along labyrinthine corridors, with Pan Tian finding and either disabling or helping them all avoid thirty-seven different traps. Not counting the ones on the stairs.
"Another one," Pan Tian said as she disabled a strange one that seemed linked to large statues of cat-like faces on either side of the hallway, "I'm starting to feel like they don't want us here."
As they walked, they came across several areas where the architecture had been repaired with a different kind of stone and far more recently.
Probably the arak, Jie thought.
The renovations included new blood red statues of the now familiar woman. Each one looked utterly out of place. None of the statues spoke to them this time, however, and Jie wondered if the statues would be more talkative if they returned another year.
Finally, they came to a door unlike those they'd encountered so far. It was a thick slab of stone, covered in hieroglyphs depicting cat people on a strange circular platform with swirls of brightly colored glyphs all around them.
Pan Tian studied it for a long moment. "I don't see any traps, but we should still be careful," she said. She tried to lift it up and it didn't budge. "Aaaand it's locked. Your turn, Jie. See if you can power through it," Pan Tian said.
The stone door met the floor without a gap large enough for Jie to get her fingers under. So, Jie gripped handholds in the sightly worn stone as best she could and pushed upward. Something groaned above the stone ceiling and the door moved just barely, but stopped as it met some kind of resistance.
Jie grunted with effort, but her grip was far from sufficient to force the ancient door.
Pan Tian grabbed a handhold beside Jie and Ithilix did the same. "Can you get a better grip?" Pan Tian asked.
Jie held the stone as best she could as she worked her way down. Though her friends strained with all they had, they weren't strong enough to do more than slow down how fast it fell without her help.
Jie made it to the base of the door, where it had left the floor just enough for Jie to get her fingers under it. She pulled, reinforcing her muscles with dragon lightning qi, and something in the ceiling groaned louder.
"I think you're doing it!" Pan Tian said.
Jie gritted her teeth and pulled harder. It moved up slightly with a screeching grind and then stopped again.
"It's stuck," Jie said, "you guys move back. This might be a little explosive, but I don't see how else to get it up. I don't want to hurt you."
Pan Tian and Ithilix both moved back, and Jie reinforced her muscles with her qi again as she cycled qi armor and made the armor around her hands react with the stone door above her fingers.
A deafening boom roared through the corridor as Jie felt something break inside the mechanism. The door shot upward, smashed into the ceiling with a thunderous crash, and rebounded back down with no resistance as sand and dust rained down on Jie from above.
Jie caught the door on the way down. It was heavy, but nothing compared to fighting with whatever the lock had been. She hefted it up, exposing the room beyond with the light of the lantern at her waist. Thick metal pipes connected to a raised, circular platform with hieroglyphs all over it in the center of the room with strange chests inscribed with white glowing runes on their surface dotted around the room.
"Wow... nice work. I hope nothing heard us," Pan Tian said.
"I'm pretty sure the whole world heard us. Wait. I sense something," Jie said, still holding the door.