Sofia approached the last door in the corridor which she had yet to open. It was another of the metallic doors without a handle, but when she came close, it did not open by itself.

Is this one broken? Maybe it’s locked somehow?

Looking around for a button to press or something like it, Sofia found nothing.

This doesn’t leave many options… I can try graveyarding my way in, maybe, but that might break the electrical things around. I could just brute force it, probably; it looks like rather regular steel, a good punch or two and it’ll break.

Might make a mess though.

Eh… I’ll just cut through.

Sofia grabbed her dagger and started cutting out a rectangle in the door following the doorframe. The blade cut through the steel like through paper. In the end the cut looked more like a big oval, because the dagger cut so well that it could draw curves in the steel without issue, so Sofia cut a roundish hole in a single big motion. The round plate of door she cut out fell backwards on Sofia’s face, hitting her forehead with a bong sound like a gong.

The door piece disappeared in Sofia’s eye storage.

That was embarrassing…

Luckily there was no one around to see it, although Pareth had undoubtedly been watching through her eyes.

“Let’s see… This looks a bit like the administrative office in Kuli’s guild. Desks and paper everywhere…”

The room was a rectangle, with no other doors, there were desks lined up against every wall, all covered in papers and things Sofia couldn’t make much sense of. In the center was a round table-like thing mirrored on the ceiling, as if a big column in the center of the room had been cut and only the base and top were left.

“This looks like another electrical device. It looks important… I should see if I can make it work.”

First thing first, Sofia walked to the desks and picked up a loose page of paper covered in black ink scribbles.

What is this… A coded language?

The page was covered in signs made of a bunch of lines and circles.

This… Doesn’t look like any language that I know of… There is clearly the usual punctuation in there, though, and numbers are just written as usual. A language from the Hero admin’s world, maybe? Or just one I’ve never heard about.

I have no clue how to even start trying to read this.

Sofia rummaged through the stacks and stacks of paper around the room. Most of the papers used the same symbols to write, but Sofia picked up a few things from them, still. First of all, there were two people using these symbols, with quite different handwriting styles, one of them being looking a bit more approximative than the other. But that was not all, there were plenty of mathematical drawings and calculations along with the unknown language. Much of it, Sofia couldn’t make sense of, and even line graphs which should be relatively easy to understand, she couldn’t read the legend of.

That being said, there were a few rarer stacks of paper in a language she could actually read.

So it was really a Dragon, good to know.

Sofia read the first paragraph aloud.

“This autonomous mechanism ensures that the ritual, once initiated, sustains and amplifies itself in perpetuity until a sufficiently stable breathing environment has been created, thus mitigating the exorbitant workload associated with manual carving labor at the microscopic scale. Through the prism of Arcanotechnical engineering, the Verdant Genesis Algorithm should emerge as a dangerous yet elegant way of combining the recent discoveries in Avian ritualistic knowledge with the principles of the Draconic breath’s natural auto-sustenance in favorable conditions to stabilize the atmospheric composition.”

That was a mouthful and a half…

At a glance, the entirety of everything written in Draconic was written in the same headache-inducing style, and all seemed to touch on the subject of creating and using rituals to reshape the planet in one way or another. There were a great many stacks of ritual circle drawings to go along with these, which, from the annotations, seemed to be mostly failed module prototypes for the “Verdant Genesis Algorithm”.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

So… This was a work room to prepare the admins’ plans for the trial. They established this place when the planet was still a frozen hellscape.

“Woah, that’s frustrating… The secrets of the trial are probably all in the pages written in that unknown language, and I can only read the awful ritual research papers?”

I’ve yet to see anything interesting in the drawings either…

With an eye sweep, Sofia stored all the mess of loose pages in the room, and took them back out in a bunch of neatly stacked piles, which she stored in her ring.

There you go, Pareth, have a look to see if I missed something useful.

This left the desks awfully empty compared to before, and Sofia could look through the weird baubles lying around them.

Oh, most of these are actually magical items! All out of power, though, but I can feel the pull of the mana gathering arrays.

Picking up one round thing in particular, Sofia recognised what it was. “A compass? A magical compass? I could really use a few identifies right now.”

Since Sofia assumed that she would be able to use Identify again when she got out of the Admin house, she stored all the random little tools and focused her attention onto the last thing in the room, the cut column thing in the middle.

Sofia walked around the round thing, looking for a way to make it work.

“These electrical things often have buttons to push or knobs to turn, there must be a way to activate it…”

After spending ten minutes trying to activate the damn thing, Sofia gave up and returned to the lobby where she had already busted the light, and called bookie out.

“Get me the Engineer, please.”

Sofia ripped out the page Bookie presented her with, and the mana mist coming out from the book spread around the lobby before solidifying as the elven engineer skeleton. As the mist spread out, the lights throughout the entire house started flickering, and weird sounds came from the kitchen area, but it calmed back down when the skeleton was fully formed.

That was almost bad. I was right to be careful until now.

She stored the skeleton and made her way back to the work room to brief the skeleton before letting him out.

So, you need to activate the thing in the middle of the room. Don’t use any magic and try to stay as far away from it as you can. You guys lose some mana over time so you’ll break things if you’re out too long, try to be fast.

Sofia unloaded the Engineer skeleton in a corner of the room on top of a desk.

The skeleton stood in place and observed the thing from where he was, tilting his upper body to get different angles. Visibly not finding anything either, he ran on the desks to go to another corner of the room. He only needed to look for a second from this angle before jumping down and quickly poking at the machine with a finger, bringing it to life under Sofia’s eyes. His job done, he jumped back to the corner.

Huh?!

Sofia was on the other side of the room so she had no idea what exactly the Engineer had done, but evidently it had worked, so she thanked him and stored him back to avoid his mana interfering with the contraption which was now lighting up with a soft green light coming from within.

Curious, Sofia searched where the skeleton had poked at and it was quite easy to find, as a carving which had previously been hard to even see was now the sole thing that had lit up on that area of the machine. It was a weird sign of a bar piercing through a circle.

So there was actually a damn button! Why make it so hard to see… It’s not sticking out from the surface, not even a tiny bit. Bar and circle… Must be the same language as those papers again.

As Sofia was looking around for other hidden buttons, the actual purpose of the machine revealed itself, a three dimensional image of something started appearing in the air above the machine, drawn line by line from the bottom up.

Sofia curiously watched the image appear line by line. For now, it looked like a misshapen white bowl, which kept extending up. After a few more seconds, Sofia understood.

Cerberus beta. This is just like what Kyle showed us in the shuttle! An image of the world… But white. It’s from before they made it a livable place… The image quality isn’t great but woah. Kyle wasn’t lying, it was a frozen hellscape. Everything’s white! It’s all ice!

Slowly, the old form of the planet took shape, and when it was completely drawn, fully covered in white ice, it suddenly shrunk down, and more things started appearing around it.

First were the gray debris rings around the planet, which looked exactly like how Sofia remembered them in Kyle’s own representation of the planet, then, after the planet shrunk again until it was the size of a small seed came a first moon, second, and third moon, all very tiny dots of light at that scale, and quite far from the planet. Circles of green light then appeared each piercing through a moon and circling around the planet.

Orbit trajectory, I’m familiar with this stuff now.

After a few seconds, the planet’s representation grew to it’s first size again, the moons grew with it, and came to line themselves up near the planet, allowing for easy viewing of everything in a single place, even if things were no longer to scale.

The image stabilized, and Sofia logically assumed that this was all there was to the image, but more lines started appearing again.

There’s more?

The lines were drawing something new beyond the moons.

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