I could not tell where we were going at any moment of the trip. Sure I had dark vision, I could see what was happening in the vehicle, but by Archina’s Webs, I couldn’t see Jack shit outside of it. I could only see the earth churning around us through the small window on the side of the drill.

Grunder knew of course. He was a dwarf, the ground might as well have been clear as air to him. Being a drill taxi driver was no joke from what I knew. You needed to drill accurately to your destination and have your own methods of determining direction on a three-dimensional map. And on top of all of that, you needed to make sure you didn’t pop out at the wrong spot.

Bad drivers could drill into someone’s home or into a mining complex.

All dangerous stuff for the untrained eye, at least that’s what Grunder said.

Eventually, the light humming took over, and I reclined and closed my eyes, resolving myself to an almost senseless experience.

Grunder’s drill was fast, piercing at about fifty miles per hour through the solid dirt. Its magically enchanted hull could bear through the strongest of dirt and if we were going directly upwards, it would have been a quick trip.

But we weren’t. There were numerous holes and minor colonies spread out throughout deep-side. Grunder would have to weave around them, making sure to avoid burrowing into someone’s living room or den. That would result in a fine from the deep-side police from what I understood.

Asrin City was large, having a radius of about two hundred miles, it was easily the largest city in all of Yggdrasil. But unlike most of its neighboring realms Asrin was extremely diverse. It had elves, trolls, dwarves, halflings, demonkin, angelkin, beastkin, goblins, fairies, pixies, fey, and even a couple of minor dieties.

Whatever their race, you could find one of them in Asrin City. Even with its demon-hating elves, full demons could be found here as well. Asrin was the most diverse city on the continent, ancient and full of mysteries and wonder. But having such a variety in species and population meant you needed different habitats for all of its people.

That was where the levels came in. There were four levels, deep-side was where we currently were. Deep-side was anything deeper than five miles underground. It was mostly trolls, molefolk, and a few other dark dwelling species. You had the occasional goblin horde as well as dwarves and gnolls, but the main residents of the Deep were the molefolk and trolls.

Above deep-side, consisting of the five-mile layer beneath the earth was down-side. Down-side was filled with similar races as the deep, but dwarves and dark elves were its main populace. It also functioned as the home of all the sun-loathing beings during the day. Vampires, zombies, gargoyles, shadow folk, and any sun-hating race would call this part of the city their home.

Then came top-side, the surface people. The top was the most populated area, mainly populated by humans, elves, and beastmen, but also contained dryads, nymphs, and most other nature spirits as well.

And above that was high-side. High-side held the winged races, as well as mages and dragons and floating cloud neighborhoods filled with angelkin. I hadn’t seen much of them when I first got here. I’d been arrested by the Celestial Order Patrol before I could even tour that part of the city.

It was a motley city, but it was an old one as well. The whole place had started as an amalgamation of various races that had to flee their land due to one disaster or another. From what I understood, Asrin itself had been a place of refuge for the surviving victims of The Lord of Darkness and his Night Minions. But it outdated even that eon and no one truly knew when the city had been started.

I sat there for a bit, thinking about what I would do once I got to down-side. I had no fantasies of acceptance. My fellow dark elves wouldn’t accept me with open arms. I was a half-demon after all. Demonkin already had a hard time gaining acceptance, and they were only the descendants of demons, the evil having been washed off their bloodline for centuries.

I had the fresh stuff, pained by the holy element and everything. I doubt anyone would be too willing to make friends, but I was used to that. Even back home I lacked friends, spending most of my days reading and tinkering with magic.

I didn’t expect anything to change, but it would be nice to see some sunlight, and maybe to study at a mage college as well. It didn’t have to be an interesting one. I wouldn’t mind a mundane magical community college, as long as it had a huge library and self-study.

Eventually, the drilling stopped and I heard the familiar bang of the taxi setting itself right side up.

“Are we there already?” I asked the dwarf.

“Aye,” he replied.

“That was fast.”

“Went through an old root-route. I just found it yesterdayso don’t go blabbing to other taximen about it no w.”

“I won’t,” I replied. “I wouldn’t even know what to tell them.”

The dwarf nodded with a smile and the drill released steam as it leveled itself onto flat ground.

“You’re a few miles away from the nearest district, all you need to do is walk yourself there. That’s not too much is it?” Grunder asked.

“Nope. I got it,” I replied, stepping out of the vehicle. I handed the man his money, two-fifty on the dot. The dwarf smiled, took the money, and entered the vehicle.

Grunder, whom I had known for ten years, waved at me, turned on his machine, and drilled back down into the earth.

I watched as his drill dug into the earth, the ground slowly closing itself behind it. A minute later, the spot we had emerged from looked like a freshly tilled plot of dirt and nothing more.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I sighed, finally letting the nervousness get to me a little bit.

“Goodbye to you too, Grunder,” I mumbled.

I turned around and started my way towards the closest district.

The area was dark. I was still underground after all, but I could see everything as clear as day.

Down-side was mainly composed of tunnels. Large tunnels, small tunnels, caverns wide enough to fit cities, and dark gloomy caves that served as homes to all types of strange creatures.

There were around three hundred million residents of Asrin City, though some mage collages predicted it might be more if you counted the undead and the strange hidden races that were speculated to exist.

Overall it was a massive city, larger in population than most nations and more ancient than most cities in all of Yggdrasil. Its caves are said to contain the graves of gods and the elites of this city could trace their linaege back to the Great Heros who had ended the Age of Darkness. Asrin was the center of magic and culture and it had been so for a long time. Even with good record keeping and historians, lots of the city’s secrets were still locked away behind the doors of time

I walked forward, keeping my eyes open for trouble. I doubted I’d find any here. Grunder had set me down too close to civilization for there to be any real threat around these parts, but still, I was in the dark.

And the dark meant that this was an untraveled area. There were no worn out paths in these cave, barely even any foilage aside from some sparse moss and darkweeds.

This wasn’t uncommon for deep-side, but down-side was different. A lot of species lived here, including those that weren’t really made to survive underground. Unless you were native to life under the earth, like a troll or a dwarf, it’d be near impossible to navigate down here.

So generally, any populated multispecies area was decently lit and easily navigable. But this area wasn’t.

“Grunder did say this was an old root route,” I mumbled as I cast a spell.

A small glowing arrow appeared in front of me, pointing up to my left.

This was a generic mapping cantrip designed specifically for residents of Asrin. I would cast a magic signal of a certain frequency, causing specific and long-lasting undulations in the fabric of the arcane. A reader stone somewhere in an occupied area would get my signal and send back a signal of its own, specific to my spell. The spell was one of the first ones I’d ever bought when I first got here and was one of the services the City of Asrin provided for everyone.

And that signal manifested as an arrow. All it did was point me in the direction of that occupied area, which should lead me to a district just a few miles away.

This specific root route was empty, lacking almost all vegetation and life, which just spoke to how old this place was.

Asrin City has a False Yggdrasil growing at its center, a mimickery of the giant tree we lived on. Its leaves covered the city and its roots had burrowed their way deep into the ground.

Over time a lot of those roots had died or receded, leaving large open navigable caverns in their wake. And even then, the dying root would welcome a whole new ecosystem of plants, fungi, animals, and even sentient beings.

But this one was dirt dry.

Root routes like this were old and forgotten. It probably hadn’t seen life since the fifth age for it to be this empty. Competition for space wasn’t a problem in the city, but competition for space near civilization was still alive and thriving.

So abandoned places grew dark and forgotten, not being touched by anything for ages. It was different top-side of course, but ruins and ancient wizard labs spotted the city, as well as sealed portals that led to other realms and destinations.

Asrin was a wide enough region itself, but when you considered the fact that the land was layered, containing multiple sublayers within each region, it was easy to understand how things might be lost down here.

They called it the City of Nations for a reason. It was like a lake within a cup, a city that had built over itself a thousand times over.

I cast a spell, a self-made echolocation spell I made by mimicking the rat bats down below. It was a tier three spell, but I elevated it to tier five, expanding its range fourfold.

A loud screech echoed through the cave.

I saw a three-dimensional model in my head of the area and all its winding paths. There was always a strange thing with sensory spells, particularly when the sense was foreign to your species. I could see space, but now was the first time I heard it. The spell didn’t alter how my mind operated but just gave me an image of the area as it was.

It ran a calculation of sounds, every silence being space and every echo being a thing. The tone, the speed, the changed inflection of the echo, everything came together to create this image in my mind.

“Alright then,” I mumbled, heading forward to my right. That was away from the city but my spell had found smoothened walls and floors in that direction, indicating a carved out footpath.

Ten minutes later I found myself crawling through a small hole, popping out the other side of a heavily bushed area.

This was a nice sign. Bushes meant life. I looked up to see small glowing mushrooms on the roof of the cave which was just a few feet above my head. The area was overgrown with vegetation, and even though the floor hinted at once having been a walking path, it was cracked and broken, letting all manner of plant life burst through its floors.

I stood up being careful to not break the mushrooms above me. Most of the plant life underground was magical, particularly the mushrooms. They fed off the arcane energy radiated by the Asrin Tree and had been specifically engineered by biomancers to produce light and reproduce quickly.

I cast the echolocation spell again. This time I got better results, hinting at an actually viable footpath, a good ways from here. I headed in that direction, coming out of another cavern a few miles later. I popped my head through the exit of the cavern, only to find myself at the edge of a cliff.

“Finally,” I sighed looking down at the grassy area below me.

I was about five hundred feet above the ground, tucked against a corner of the roof of a tunnel. Here the mushrooms were bigger, almost the size of my body and dangling down from the roof with brilliant light that illuminated the whole tunnel.

I gave my eyes a moment to adjust to all of the brightness and looked down and around in all directions. I could see giant pillars in the distance, roots of the Asrin Tree piercing through the caverns. There was civilization.

Underground populations tended to center themselves near the Asrin Tree’s roots, both for magical purposes and travle capablities. The root cut paths through the ground and brought vitilitay to whatever they touched, making them the ample area to settle down at. They also hollowed out the earth around them, making them perfect traveling pathways.

I charged my spell, taking the required few seconds to cast it and jumped. The ground came at me quickly but midway through my fall, I released the spell.

Featherfall, I thought, channeling the Arcane into my mind and forcing my will onto reality itself.

The ground slowed its approach. I felt a force pushing me up at a frightful pace. This version of featherfall was a force spell, one that was designed to push against gravity as it pulled me down. For it to work efficiently you had to cast at the midpoint of your fall or slightly past the midpoint, because if you cast it any earlier, you’d be liable to start floating before you hit the ground, or even flying upwards if you gave the spell too much mana. Then you’d have to cancel the spell and cast it all over again or just take the fall itself.

There were other versions of course, but that required far more mana then I was comfortable with. Those versions summoned a calculation spirit to manage the spell for you and suddenly, a thirty mana spell could become a one hundred mana spell.

My feet landed gently on the grass filled ground, if only with a light thump.

Nice.

I cast the location spell once again. The arrow appeared, still pointing to my left but slightly higher this time. It pointed to the giant roots I’d seen earlier.

I looked over to the distance and saw a gleam of light a few miles away.

“Finally,” I whispered.