There were more people shouting for them to keep going, and soon enough, they reached the wall at the other end. Here, queues of Climbers were formed in front of another massive gate, as well as dozens of smaller doors around it.

“If you are critically injured, at death’s door, call here!” a voice shouted.

“Here!” Gad shouted in reply, before any of them could even react to it. “Here!”

A short, stocky man came running out of the crowd. He was bald and pinkish, and had a long, fleshy, tube-like nose that came down to his chin. His ears were two fleshy, flat squares on his bald and wrinkly head.

“Did you call?” he asked.

“Yes!” Gad said, and pointed at Rel.

The man tutted and his eyes went unfocused.

“An alfin… And bad…”

They exchanged a look between them. What was he doing?

“Yes. No. Okay, I’ll send them your way! Thanks!”

The man’s eyes focused back on them and he looked up at Gad. “Party leader?”

“Uh… No, I…”

“Here, me!” Row said. “We’re together.”

“ID?” the man asked.

“Uh? Oh, yes! ROW293457741238931XAV.”

Nar briefly noted how he was slightly older than the other party leader, through the growing buzzing in his head.

“Got it! You see the path?” the man asked.

“The what?”

“The path. Arrows! Like the ones you followed up here. In white?”

Row looked around, uncertain. “Uh, no… Oh, wait! I see it!”

“Good, follow that! It will take you to the alfin healers,” the pink man said. “They’ll stabilize your friend and look after the rest of you too. Good luck, and welcome to the O-Nex!”

“But…”

“If you are critically injured, at death’s door, call here!”

And he was gone again.

“Let’s just go,” Tun said. “We follow you, Row.”

Row gulped and nodded. “Okay. Uh… Follow me, I guess.”

The path wound up around the massive queues that were even now still growing, and took them to one of the non-descript smaller doors, dwarfed in the giant wall of smooth white that grew above it.

As they approached it, the door swung open by itself, and the sound of chaos reached them from within.

“Crystal…” Lim whispered, peering inside. “It’s madness in there!”

“Nowhere else to go,” Row said. “Stay close!”

They stepped in, and the door shut behind them.

Nar looked in bewilderment to the people shouting and running around them. Most were carrying boxes and trays of stuff. Others were shouting from open doors. And climbers were in rows of beds, with white curtains dividing them.

“Guys, keep going to your allotted healer!” a tall woman, with eight long and skinny arms told them. Her hair was gray and bundled up in a tight, neat bun atop her head. Her uniform was white and gray as well. “Go on, don’t block the door!”

“Ah, yes! Yes… Ma’am!” Row said, jerking to attention.

Then she rushed forward, and all of them followed suit.

There were Climbers gathered around the beds, in various stages of treatment and with their bodies bandaged.

A short lengos in a uniform closed the curtain of one of the beds they passed by. Nar only managed to catch a glimpse of a party of Climbers hugging and crying around someone who was lying on the bed, and whose face was covered.

Nar’s jaw tensed at the sight.

I hope we’re not too late…

Row navigated them out of the room, and into an enormous hall that was filled to the brim with the wounded and the treated, the moaning and the weeping.

She took a turn to the left, and they followed her up a flight of massive stairs.

Above them, a giant, white and colorful wall of light depicted the same symbol they had seen in the giant display, before the Ceremony. The Crystal at its center, with its five rings, the largest in the middle, then the two second largest above and below that, and then the last two, the smallest, above and below the tips of the Crystal Itself. And around it, the still unknown fourteen symbols.

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The light and the color shining through that wall of light inundated the whole hall and staircase, and Nar couldn’t help but stare at it as they climbed higher and higher, even in his state of exhaustion.

The light was warm on his face, and though bright, it did not blind him.

Unconsciously, he moved a little closer to the handrail as they climbed, and he noticed that the light wall was composed of smaller, square components, which together, formed the whole picture.

It was not the same type of display as before. This one was solid. Made of some kind of transparent material through which the light filtered through in different colors to make up the design of the symbol…

He was so distracted by the light wall that he almost collided with Gad in front of him.

“What’s wrong?” Kur asked.

“The-The path! It’s gone!” Row said, staring at the floor with a flabbergasted expression. “It just disappeared…”

“Great,” Jaz sighed.

“Oh, not again…” Tuk muttered.

“Hush,” Kur told him and everyone. “We’re out!”

“What do we do now?” Tun asked. “Do we look for someone?”

“I guess… Oh wait, it's back! Come on, let’s go before it disappears again!”

She resumed climbing and they rushed after her.

“You worried about this?” Tuk whispered at Kur.

“We’re out, Tuk. I’m sure it’s fine. They probably just changed us to another healer,” Kur said.”

“I… Yeah. That could be it.”

Nar couldn’t blame the trugger’s nervousness. The last time they had followed a broken path had not ended well for them. In fact, it had almost ended them.

He himself couldn’t help but feel a little knot of worry at the pit of his stomach, along with everything else that told him that his body was attempting to shut down on him.

Come on! We didn’t come all this way just to pass out before the damn healers! He angrily told himself.

Up and up they went, and just when Nar thought that he might need to take Gad on her offer after all, Row took them out of the stairwell, and into another corridor.

This one was less busy, its walls a nondescript soft gray, and it was lined by rows of chairs bolted onto the walls. They passed several doors, but most of them were shut.

There were only a smattering of people sitting on the chairs, as well as some open doors, which revealed rows and rows of beds and Climbers being treated in a much calmer atmosphere than the one they had left below.

Nar’s eyes went wide at the sight of hands, appendages and many other such limbs of different kinds and shapes glowing with bright lights of different colors, some of them the same gray as his own aura, pressing or hovering over wounds and Climbers.

“My Crystal…” Cen whispered. “It’s real. Healing is real!”

Nar swallowed hard.

The power to heal. To cure and mend, and reverse injury. It really was true!

With all the things they had come to uncover outside of their cubeplant, Nar had started to doubt a little on whether such a miraculous thing as healing could even be real or not.

But here it was.

“Clear the way!” someone shouted from up ahead, startling them out of their frozen shock.

The party quickly cleared the middle of the corridor, and someone pushed a bed through, a pass out alfin laying upon it. A trio of panicked Climbers followed after them, and the group disappeared into one of the many closed doors, closing it right back behind them.

That didn’t look good, Nar thought.

“Row?” a young man called, an alfin, from an open door a few steps from where they still stood in stunned silence. He didn’t look much older than they were.

“Y-Yes! That’s us!” Row stammered.

“Good! Quickly, in here!” he said, stepping out into the corridor to let them pass.

“Where’s the alfin?” a woman asked them, her uniform looking different that the others they’d seen so far.

She was dressed in some sort of large white and gray open coat that dropped all the way past her knees.

She was herself an alfin as well, with penetrating blue eyes. Her brown hair was neatly tightened into the same type of bun they’d seen all the other people with long hair have.

“Here!” Jul said, stepping forward.

“On the bed. Gently!” she ordered, as she finished tying up her long sleeves to expose her arms. “The rest of you, lay the wounded down on the other beds, I’ll be with you shortly! Fon, grab it please.”

As they spread out around the room, doing as told, the man rushed to some sort of heavy looking, gold and silver box, that gleamed multicolor in the light, and placed his hands above it.

Nar lowered Kur to a seated position on a fresh-looking bed that was nothing like whatever they had called beds back in the cubeplant, then lowered him back, lifting his legs onto the bed.

Kur groaned in pain then sighed and relaxed.

“Thanks, man,” he said, squinting at Nar. “Appreciate it.”

“No worries,” Nar said, sitting down heavily on the chair next to the bed.

He was sweating profusely by then, and his breath came in ragged and desperate.

A loud click made him look over, and he saw Fon lean into the big box and grab something with careful movements.

“It’s our last vial, Healer Hyz.”

The healer took whatever Fon had in his closed fist into hers, Nar never getting a chance to see what it was. Then, she leaned over Rel and waved her closed fist over her face, muttering to herself. On her other hand, a soft warm yellow glow encased her fingers, and she ran them over Rel’s body.

“Crystal, this is bad…” she whispered.

“Will she be okay?” Jul asked, her voice trembling.

“I… I don’t know. I’m not going to lie. This is the worst case of the Yearning that I’ve ever seen,” Hyz said, not lifting her eyes from Rel. “How did she deplete herself like this?”

“She… Has a strange path,” Kur said, forcing himself onto his elbows. “It’s very strong, but it takes a lot out of her… We're only here because she used a very powerful skill to save us.”

And Crystal knows how long she’s actually been down there, Nar thought. Plus everything else…

“A strange path?” Hyz said, finally looking away from her patient to fix Kur with a frown. “What do you…”

“Healer Hyz, I think this is them! The party at the end!” Fon suddenly said, his eyes going wide.

Hyz’ eyebrows went up. “Oh… I think you’re right. And that means, this girl has a penitent path. She’s the one that shot down the dragonfly.”

“Yes!” Kur said. “That sounds like what she called it. Her class change.”

Hyz went quiet, drumming her fingernails against her chin.

“We can’t save her.”

“What?” Tuk, Jul, Gad and Nar shouted in unison.

Hyz lifted her hands in a placating gesture. “Not here, at least. She needs exposure to a much stronger Source in order to replenish herself. Which means she needs to get to a temple.”

“When?” Gad asked.

“Now,” Hyz said. “But…”

The door suddenly slammed open, and a man peaked his head inside.

He had an enormous mane of messy, tangled brown red hair, and his sleeveless arms were covered in fur of the same color. He was dressed in strange black clothes, with some sort of lines of flowing multi-color dangling from several pockets and chains.

When he saw them, his tusked mouth parted in a smile, revealing a mouth of yellowed teeth to match his yellowed tusks.

Nar forced himself to stand up. He did not like that smile.

“Who are you?” Fon shouted in outrage. “You can’t be here! There’re treatments ongoing!”

The tusked, hairy man ignored Fon, and instead looked back outside.

“Boss!” he shouted to the corridor. “In here, I found them!”

“Ah! Nice one!” a voice shouted in reply.

Before any of them could do anything, a group of men walked into the room, and leading them was an imposing man, with yellow, scaled skin, and a cruel, sharp grin beneath slits and completely red eyes.

“This is them alright. We’ve found our prize, boys!”