Kaz gently knocked on the door of Lianhua’s room, then pushed it open so he could peer inside. He knew she was there because he could see her dantians through the wall, but she had a tendency to become so engrossed in her work that she didn’t even hear him knock. She also forgot to eat, which was at least partially why he was there.

As usual, she was seated behind the low table, pillows mounded around her as she pored over books and scrolls. He was glad to see a cup nearby, so she had at least had something to drink, but the only plate in sight was the one he had brought to her yesterday.

The human female had spent the last five days following the same routine. She sat here, reading the oldest records she could beg, borrow, or steal from the husede, until she fell asleep in her pillows. When Kaz, Raff, or Chi Yincang brought her food or drink, she would take a few bites or a sip, and then return to work.

Her hair was far from its usual sleek style, with tangled strands dangling in her face and down her back, and there were shadows beneath her eyes. Kaz wasn’t sure why the dark circles were there, but she hadn’t been injured, and they seemed to get worse when she hadn’t slept, so he thought it was a sign of exhaustion rather than illness.

“Lianhua,” he said, setting the bowl he held on the table, ignoring the piles of parchment already there. Risking damage to her precious papers was the best way to get Lianhua’s attention.

Sure enough, even though she hadn’t seemed to notice Kaz’s presence, Lianhua’s hands darted out, and she picked up the bowl. Without even looking at it or him, she tried to shove it back at him.

Kaz folded his arms across his chest, refusing to accept it. On his shoulder, the little dragon, Li, hissed at the sudden movement, and then tried to dive into the bowl, as she’d been doing ever since Kaz picked it up from the husede cooking cavern.

Kaz took a step back and shook his head. “Lianhua, you need to eat,” he told her. “You lied when you told me Iron body cultivators only needed food once a day. Raff says you need more food right after a rank advancement, not less.”

Lianhua’s blurry amethyst eyes turned up to him, and she blinked, giving a soft click of her tongue. “Missing a meal or two won’t hurt me,” she told him, voice hoarse with disuse.

His eyes narrowed, and the fur on the back of his neck lifted slightly as Kaz glared back. “You’re only eating once a day, if that, and when you do, it’s not a full meal.” He pointed accusingly to the old plate, which still held a mound of now-dry mushrooms.

Lianhua glanced at it, pink spots rising in her pale cheeks. “It’s disgusting,” she muttered. “The mosui only ever ate bugs and fungus, and I never want to see another grub or mushroom again.”

The mosui were the small but powerful creatures who had inhabited this city when Kaz, Li, and Lianhua had been captured and brought here against their wills. The mole-like beings had used ki-powered collars left behind by an ancient race to control their captives, and their leader, Zhangwo, performed experiments on any being with a core that his minions brought in. He was going to do the same to Li and Lianhua, though the human hadn’t yet cultivated a core of her own, but Kaz had managed to kill him first, through use of a powerful weapon created by the same race who had made the collars.

Lianhua called that race the ‘Diushi’. She and the other humans had come to Kaz’s mountain specifically in order to find proof of Lianhua’s wild theory that the last members of that lost empire had come here after vanishing from their vast domain practically overnight. After the husede, the descendants of enslaved members of a reclusive race, turned on their mosui masters, Lianhua had believed that such proof was nearly in her hands, and arranged to be able to read the documents left behind by Zhangwo.

Unfortunately, that was where things had fallen apart. While Zhangwo claimed he had once been ‘Pantu Lianren’, a wise and famous advisor to the Diushi Emperor, he had also been at least a little insane. Nothing in his documents could serve as evidence that this city had been built by the Diushi, and even if it had - which Lianhua said was likely, given the style of the architecture - there was no way to know how old it was. Once something was several hundred years old, it was difficult to pinpoint its age precisely, and this place could just as easily have been built before the Diushi vanished from Lianhua’s country as after.

There was one person who might have been able to provide solid evidence one way or the other: Nucai, the self-proclaimed servant of the ‘Master’. He was at least as old as Zhangwo, who had to have been alive for a millenia or more, and each time Kaz had spoken to him, it was clear that he was extremely powerful. Much to Lianhua’s disappointment, this mysterious being refused to speak to her or anyone other than the new leaders of the city.

Apparently, the city had been created to mine the ki-crystals that naturally developed here, and Nucai’s only concern was that that effort continued. Thabil, Dax, and the other members of the new ‘council’ left their meeting with him looking very grim, and had immediately set about making sure that mining resumed in the abandoned level below. The miners weren’t slaves any longer, of course, and they received plenty of food and comfortable housing in exchange for their service, but the council let it be known that if the mining ceased, the city would end, so they had no lack of volunteers, husede and kobold alike.

Kaz pointed to the bowl in Lianhua’s hands. “Now that the mosui aren’t spreading fresh fulan to keep everyone out, the kobolds have been able to burn most of it, at least on the city levels. Thabil even suggested we send gatherers above the mid-levels and gather fresh plants and live animals like fuergar in order to grow them here.”

And that was very strange indeed. Food and water were limited resources almost everywhere in the mountain, and when an area ran out of those resources, kobolds simply moved. Over time, the plants, animals, and pools of water that formed naturally replenished, and in a generation or two, another kobold tribe could settle into the space again. The idea of bringing food in or intentionally trying to grow new patches of lichen and mushrooms was entirely outside of any kobold’s experience.

Here, however, the Diushi had created a system which drew fresh water up from the rivers that ran far beneath the Deep. That, along with the many caverns of extremely versatile yumi reeds and the all-important mines, meant that this city had and could continue to exist for centuries. They never needed to worry about running out of clean water, and in the tower, the building where Zhangwo and many of the mosui had lived, water could actually be drawn from a tube protruding through the wall in many rooms, so the residents didn’t have to go fetch it when they needed some, which was a task that had occupied the days of many kobold pups throughout the years.

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Lianhua eyed the bowl suspiciously, then lifted it to her nose and sniffed. Pleasure swept over her face, and Kaz heard her stomach rumble loudly. It was echoed by Li’s, though he doubted the human female could hear it.

In Kaz’s mind, an image formed of the dragon eating Lianhua’s meal. When the golden reptile finished swallowing the contents, she simply opened her mouth a bit wider, and ate the bowl as well. Kaz shook his head in response. Like most of the mosui’s possessions, the metal bowl was encrusted with gems and a few chips of ki-crystal. Li actually seemed to get more nourishment from the little crystals than she did the food itself, though she enjoyed them both equally.

Lianhua sighed again, then pushed aside a stack of scrolls with none of the reverence she usually showed for anything with runes carved, written, or painted on it. She noted his look of shock as she settled the bowl back in front of her and laughed.

“Those are records of the crystals taken from the mine several hundred years ago. Weights, impurities, and quantities of each type. Other than the fact that red crystals are by far the most common, while blue is the least, it’s not interesting, even to me.”

Lifting a bite of stew to her mouth with a utensil carved from a large yumi reed, she blew on it gently and said, “I should still feel guilty for abusing them, since some scholar after me might find value in them, but I just can’t. There are so many of them, and they’re enough to send the most intractable of insomniacs to sleep.”

She ate two large bites, chewing each one thoroughly before swallowing, then burst out, “Kaz, it’s ridiculous! I know the Diushi came here after leaving Sheng, but there isn’t a single shred of definitive evidence to prove it! The Diushi could just as easily have developed this city before the fall, and abandoned it like everything else. The mosui might have been here at the time, or they might have moved in soon after, and all I can tell is that the earliest records are from around a thousand years ago. The Diushi are never directly mentioned, and there’s certainly not anything that says, ‘We left our homeland because of a plague, or famine, or religious epiphany, and came to Shengsheng mountain in order to-’ do whatever it is that an all-powerful civilization does when they vanish into the mists of time.”

“Can’t you just go home with what you’ve already learned?” Kaz asked. It seemed to him and Li that discovering this new city should be enough for Lianhua, and they were both eager to be away.

Lianhua’s gaze slid away, and she puffed a strand of hair away from her lips. “Not good enough,” she muttered. “I said I would prove the Diushi came here after the Fall. That’s what my final project is based on, and it’s what I promised my grandfather I would do.”

Kaz sighed and scratched his muzzle. Absently, he reached out and picked up one of the wrinkled mushrooms left over from her previous meal and gave it to the dragon on his shoulder. After seeing his friend eat rocks, even ki-filled ones, he was no longer worried that something like a day-old mushroom would hurt her.

“What about Yingtao? Raff says she should have recovered by now.”

This was a low blow. Lianhua was almost as worried about the last member of her party - a servant who had fallen sick and had to be left behind in Raff’s homeland - as she was about finding the proof she needed. Lianhua and Yingtao were friends, rather than simply two people bound by tribe and history, and it was obvious that Lianhua wanted to get back to check on the other female.

Lianhua’s lips flattened, and her gaze slid away. “Yingtao understands how important this is to me. If I don’t… We can’t… No, I need to do this, for both of us. Did Song Zexian let Guo Lin turn him from his task? No! Did Fan Qing give up when-”

Kaz cut her off. Once Lianhua started referring to historical members of her race, she wouldn’t stop until the subject was changed.

“You originally came here because you believed you might find your proof in the Deep,” he reminded her. “You only came down through the mountain because the portal from Raff’s land was closed.”

That, too, was strange. Kaz was born in the Deep, the center of the kobold civilization, but his mother, Oda, never allowed him to go to the city. Instead, she kept him in their tribe’s den, and Kaz had only seen the wonders of the Deep from a distance. He was still a puppy, not quite old enough to begin gathering plants with the older pups, when something had happened, and the tribe was split, part remaining behind, and part traveling upward through the mountain with Oda as their chief.

But even as a puppy, Kaz had heard stories of humans. In fact, his den mother at the time - who was someone other than his aunt Rega, who took over after they fled the Deep - had often told the pups stories about the hairless, flat-faced beings who entered the Deep and traded with the kobolds. Occasionally, these strangers would explore deeper into the mountain, and those stories were invariably the most fascinating as well as the most violent of them all. Kobolds who became entangled with humans usually died a horrible death, but if they didn’t, the humans would sometimes leave them with great riches when they departed.

Of course, these were just stories to Kaz, because that den mother and his father, Ghazt, both told him that humans didn’t come to the mountain any more. There was never any explanation of why this was true, just that it was, and Kaz had gotten the impression that whatever caused the change had happened so long ago that it was only a distant memory of a whispered story.

Instead, according to the humans, the mountain had been closed not much more than fifteen years ago. Not many humans, even among Raff’s people, had been interested in visiting what they considered a grim and primitive place inhabited by lesser beings, so it had taken some time for the change to be noticed, and even longer for the knowledge to become widespread.

The news hadn’t yet reached the distant land Lianhua, Chi Yincang, and their former companion, Gaoda, had come from. They had no idea that they wouldn’t be able to simply enter the mountain and leave again within a few days or weeks. By the time they found out, they had already traveled for nearly a month, and Lianhua’s friend Yingtao was very ill. They couldn’t leave Yingtao behind and return home, as Gaoda suggested, but once they found someone who could help her, the healer said it would take weeks before she was ready to travel. Since they had to wait anyway, Lianhua had insisted upon hiring someone - who turned out to be Raff - to guide them to a rumored entrance near the peak of the mountain.

There, they met Kaz, who had recently acquired Li’s egg, and after the humans negotiated with Kaz’s sister, Katri, Kaz led the humans down through the mountain toward the Deep. During their journey, Li hatched, and Kaz learned more about the peculiar power that dwelt in his core, accidentally opening his middle dantian and nearly killing himself in the process. Kaz met Nucai for the first time when that ancient being somehow reached out to him while he was trying to repair his damaged core. Nucai fixed the core for Kaz, saving his life and allowing him to begin the process of refining his body like the humans.

A good bit of time had passed as Kaz thought and Lianhua ate slowly in order to avoid answering him. At last, however, she set down her utensil and sighed. “Yes,” she admitted, “I meant to go to the Deep, but now I have a whole city to go through. Surely the proof I need is somewhere here. I just need to keep looking until I find it.”

Kaz shrugged, but his ears twitched, and it was his turn to have difficulty meeting her eyes. The truth was, he longed to be out of this place. The mosui were almost all gone, with only a few of the young ones remaining, and that only because Lianhua had begged the husede to spare them, but there were grim reminders of their existence everywhere, and it made him uncomfortable. Plus, so long as he stayed here-

“Kaz!” A sweet little yip of excitement came from behind him, and he flinched as he turned, already knowing what he would see.

Sure enough, there in the doorway was a pretty kobold female, pure white fur dyed with the red patterns of the Redmanes, and her bright eyes fixed on him. On his shoulder, Li mantled, stretching out her neck and hissing at the female. He might have imagined it, but he almost thought a tiny wisp of smoke swirled up from one nostril as she did so.

Kaz bowed slightly, ears flat and tail tucked, as he said, “Oh. Fair howls, Elvi.”