Truth nodded slowly. He stroked his chin, and frowned thoughtfully at the wall. With deliberate emphasis he tapped his index finger against his lip. A sage glint burst from his eyes, his shoulders screaming of insight!

I officially have no idea what that ghost was talking about. Just what the Hell is a penny?

It certainly sounded like money, but he wasn’t sure he had ever heard of one. Maybe a foreign currency? It tickled some misty part of his brain, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

Starbrite is a gambler? He owes money? To who? And why would taking money from him make him stronger? Surely it’s the reverse if he’s got unpayable debts, right?

The room was completely trashed, and he wasn’t seeing anything useful. If there was some dark truth hidden in the books, it was gone now. Time for him to move on. The spiders in the hallway had all vanished. The hallway now looked rather mundane, save that there was some twist to the light that seemed to pull all the life from it. Truth stood frozen in the doorway. The sensation that something about the hallway had managed to make the cement walls and steel doors more dead was nauseating.

He took deep breaths, trying to steady himself. Slow his racing heart. It was an illusion, or a shift in local reality. Some higher dimension trying to muscle its juniors. He could deal with that. He repeated the thought over and over until he half believed it, shoved more power into the Blessing of the Bronze Sea, and stepped into the hallway.

Pennies and ledgers. Not creative. Truth started connecting things in his mind. The Shattervoid despised Starbrite, not just for kidnapping their kid, but for his cheap magics and mutilated soul. The core of the System was more or less the same as any other high quality business management spell… as defined by the denizens of this particular rock. It combined HR, payroll, accounts payable and receivable, inventory management, sales, task management, messaging, and probably a bunch of other things that he was either not thinking about or never introduced to him during his employment.

Not hard at all to draw a line from pennies and ledgers to the System.

Is a penny a lot of money, or a little bit? I’m going to say… a little bit.

Alright, so… why? Why all of this? If he was gambling, who the Hell could take the other side of the bet with Starbrite? They would have to come here through the Shattervoid, and Truth hand never caught a whisper of any foreign power trying to muscle in on Starbrite’s turf. Ironic as that might be. And if there was some Nascent Soul hegemon onboard the Shattervoid, why not send them in to save Sally? Or to put Starbrite in a box?

Sally had been kidnapped for five years. The Shattervoid, with their monopoly on interstellar travel, seriously couldn’t put together a team of mercenaries specializing in asset recovery? There was something else going on here. There was some fundamental rule at play that was strong enough to bind the Shattervoid and… everyone. Everyone who might come and take a bite of this rotten-apple world.

He kept moving down the hallway. His interest in opening new doors had dropped to nil. Staircases, on the other hand, were now very highly sought.

Even if we are a backwater planet, we still got by. We imported most of our food, which means people were buying our exports. All those talismans and minerals and other stuff weren’t worthless. Someone was buying them, even if it was for short money. Except it couldn’t have been that short, because otherwise, why go through all this nonsense?

It was the question he found himself swirling around again and again- he had more or less figured out what Starbrite had done, but the why was still shrouded in the shifting layers of reality.

Why does someone start a business? To make money. Why does someone want to make more money? Well, that’s pretty philosophical, isn’t it? Once you get past subsistence, it’s ambition or desire for luxury or vanity- something like that. But Starbrite didn’t have a mansion anyone had ever heard of. Never showed off in public decked out in gems and spells. He made no public appearances at all. Nobody knew what he looked like or sounded like. So why go through all the trouble? Just to collect the souls of his employees?

There simply had to be a better way. This way took centuries. Wouldn’t arranging a giant war, where you promised one side victory by use of your top secret System, but were secretly also providing it to the other side, be a whole lot faster? Hell, he was a Nascent Soul powerhouse. Couldn’t he just establish a ritual around a city of ten million and exterminate them? Or something? Why go so slow? Why be so secretive? Why just take part of the soul?

A better life for your children. That was the other reason to get into business- planting money trees to shade your kids. But Starbrite never married, so far as anyone knew. Nor did he have any publicly acknowledged children. And again, even if it was about looking after the next generation, why all this? Why all this… everything?

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The hallway was blooming now, fruiting and flowering with mushrooms and strange blossoms whose meaty petals hid hungry thorns. A warm air blew, promising comfort, carrying the smell of iron and salt. The wind seemed to rise from the shadows under the flowers and beneath the mushroom caps, twisting the air into braids of half-memories. And behind the wind, in the darkest parts of the shadow? Something vast. Something that eyes could not comprehend. Something already surrounding the hallway. All this phenomena was Truth’s mind desperately trying to comprehend something that it should never have been confronted with.

He staggered down the hall. He wasn’t hurt. It was just hard, pressing through the weight of these intrusive things. The base seemed to have stretched in length, or perhaps the floor was imperceptibly angled downwards, descending deeper and deeper into the sea. In any case, he had been walking down a straight corridor for who knows how long. There was some trick here, and he didn’t think it was as nice as a simple illusion.

The smell of iron and salt intensified. There was a familiarity to the smell. A calling to the memory. Nuances eased through the edges- meat, red clay, and the particular air you get just after a storm has passed over a salt marsh. He could see a great tree ahead of him, a willow that filled a space larger than the hall, its long streaming branches tossed gently in the soft wind. In front of it was a patch of sweet grass and thyme, freshening the meaty air.

He reached the tree. The willow branches brushed their narrow leaves over him. The thyme was crushed under his feet, their sweet-spicy smell energizing him, sharpening his senses. The hallway ended on the other side of the tree. Just a flat wall that seemed to faintly bear the traces of a riverside view, painted in broad and bold brushstrokes. The tree and soft grass were surrounded by taller, spiky looking rushes. The long, straight green leaves poked upwards like clusters of misericords, with the central stalk forming an exaggerated estoc by coming to a conical point.

One such reed, far to the left of the tree, was particularly vibrant. He could see it was bullying the other plants around it, slashing at them with its sharp green leaves. A faint memory, almost an instinct, nudged him. He could stay here. Resting under the willow, enjoying the peace and beauty of it all. Or he could press on, and face whatever came next.

He half smiled. There were always places to stop, to turn back or find another path. He walked over and, minding the sharp edges, pulled up the bullrush. The reed left behind a small hole in the wet dirt, but it quickly spread and widened, getting deeper. Revealing what was hidden below. He had found the stairs.

They were concrete stairs. Some thoughtful soul had pressed a checkered pattern into them, to improve traction. There was a metal railing installed at a sensible height and when the light talismans were still working, they were more than enough to make the entire stairwell bright. Now they were just shattered wall decorations, adding a desolate flair to the crushingly liminal. But the intention had been good.

No strange scents, or scenes rich in subtle meaning. Just a better-than-average commercial staircase. Truth found it more restful and comforting than the willow tree. He grew up in Harban and was a city kid to the middle part of his bones. Sitting on the riverbank under a willow tree wasn’t his scene. Squatting malevolently in a dark stairwell was practically his birthright.

Down and down, deeper and deeper. One flight became ten, ten became twenty. Space was stretching here, or the meaning of the stairs was becoming more prominent. Truth was tempted to just jump down, but there was something in that void below. Something hungered for more than flesh. Wasn’t like he was going to get tired trotting down the stairs. He stayed patient.

He didn’t know how long his patience held for. It ran out before the stairs did. He was missing something.

It isn’t likely to be a deliberate trap. The curse has completely mutated at this point. It’s running off the accumulated cultivation of who knows how many people with the System, and it’s clearly smashed into the reality shifting ward around the base. And it’s doing so at a large enough scale that Starbrite can’t just step in and immediately fix it. Which is… I kind of feel like I should pat myself on the back, but at the same time, that feels kind of tasteless. A lot of people are probably getting hurt or killed out there.

He thought about it, shrugged, and gave himself a little pat on the back. People were going to be dying regardless. He should take pride in striking a tangible blow against Starbrite. Moping sure wasn’t going to achieve anything.

So having determined that it isn’t intentional and is almost certainly the result of several enormous systems going BOOM at the same time, I can… do what, exactly? Stab the stairs?

He scoffed. A moment later, he sneakily glanced around and prodded a step with the Tongue. It crunched, as concrete does, and crumbled. Nothing else happened. Truth coughed and acted like he hadn’t just stabbed a staircase because he couldn’t think of a better idea.

Hmm. Reality was being manipulated and space was being distorted. He didn’t know if he was trapped in a loop or not, but the difference was academic. Was there a jank magic solution to this?

Of course there was.

He just didn’t know what it might be. So, regrettably, that was out.

Violence was out, hacking together some nonsense was out, couldn’t walk out… he was running out of options.

Heh. Walking. Running. If I knew where the bottom was, I could reach it in a step. Theoretically.

Truth nodded slowly. He stroked his chin, and frowned thoughtfully at the wall. With deliberate emphasis he tapped his index finger against his lip. Then gently banged his head against the wall.

I don’t actually have to know what’s at the place I step to. I can step through walls. The angel managed to send me tens of kilometers with a single step. That’s kind of the point of the Earth Folding Step.

He sighed. He still didn’t know what was at the bottom of the stairwell, but Incisive was just giving him the sense that everywhere was dangerous. No special alert about what he was about to do.

Hell with it. He poured his magic into the spell, fortified the Blessing of the Bronze Sea, and stepped. When his foot hit the floor, he was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking at an ancient bronze door.