This time I decided against the Wheel. While it had given me a good reward the first time, I seem to have made an enemy of whoever’s running this show. I wouldn’t put it past them to make my reward some kind of curse.

Instead, I chose a new Schema Slot. Since I’d already spent both of mine I’d leave this one in reserve to ‘capture’ something truly interesting.

While Argent recuperated, I focused on digging down. My sphere of influence had expanded in that direction as well, and I had an idea.

If I dug a hidden tunnel to the Sanctum underneath the garden and flooded it, I could close the door I’d created into, leaving the only route to my Core disguised as a simple pond. Even if somebody discovered the passage they would have to swim then climb, all the way harassed by my poisonous creations.

As an added layer of defense I cut several pits into the ground and then covered them over with a false floor of thin stone. Within these pits I seeded several Somnolent Blooms. Anyone who fell in would be incapacitated by sleeping poisons and since the toxins were airborn, they’d catch anyone trying to help them out.

There was a primal satisfaction to building out my little fortress. I never tired of it. Next I began to play with the Somnolent Blooms themselves. They had a handy little mechanism to spray out spores when disturbed, and I was curious whether I could enhance that enough to make them genuinely dangerous in an explosive sense.

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A frog sat croaking in the garden. Its wide eyes blinked as it saw a round, fat kind of puffball mushroom sprout from the dirt in front of it, growing up from nothing. The mushroom grew and grew as the frog let out a confused riii. In seconds the skin of the mushroom was starting to strain under internal pressure and the frog made a split-second decision. It jumped.

A moment later the mushroom split open with an audible phoomp of releasing tension and thick, solid pellets of hardened chitin went spraying into the air as shrapnel. They peppered the dirt and tore holes in nearby mushrooms, laying waste to a small area around the explosive bloom.

This had been my hardest project yet. I had spent two actual days slowly refining the precise forces involved, and had nearly found the balance of enough pressure to detonate with force, but enough skin tension to hold until an outside stimuli triggered the explosion. Nevermind the fact I still hadn’t made one large enough to menace a human.

In that time, I had successfully chewed away the earth underneath the sanctum, creating an underground labyrinth that would only grow more treacherous once the rain came and flooded it.

I had also sent Argent on several short scouting missions, mostly on her own insistence. She had gone to the sewer outflow that marked the end of my domain and peered through for me, discovering that the floodwaters were pouring into a small and fetid lake. I briefly considered having her move my ring, just long enough to sweep up the local wildlife and add it to my repertoire, but something stopped me.

It was in a Core’s instinct not to move, and there might very well be good reason why.

It was a shame. Considering the amount of water and waste being dumped into that lake, as disgusting as trawling through it would be there was every chance of finding at least one gemstone among the muck. With my expansive senses and Argent’s help we could fish out material for a new Core.

It would have to wait until the next time I leveled.

In the meantime I simply worked on my lair, nurtured my garden, and planted poisonous seeds. Argent was moving faster and faster on her three legs, easily conquering the ratty obstacle course I had built for her recovery.

As for Aurum and the egg, neither moved. The golden serpent slept like the dead, slowly growing slightly larger, and the egg never made so much as a twitch. I had tried pushing Mana into it to speed the hatching, but to no avail.

It was when Argent was making her farthest reconnaissance yet that something happened to disturb my idyllic little world. In the tunnels, she suddenly encountered three men moving a large wicker chest. Their lantern cast their shadows around the corner, giving her time to scuttle into a shadowy nook before they came into sight. The three of them were dressed in leather aprons and short, fluffy caps, looking completely out of place stomping through sewer mud in boots.

Two of them lugged the chest, while the third ran his gloved hands along the wall, reading the same marks the fat man and the skinny man had been following. “This way, this way…” He mumbled.

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As they passed on, Argent scurried out, tailing them at a discrete distance.

“That rat’s following us.” I cursed as one of them spotted her, sharper-eyed than his companions.

“There’s rats everywhere, Peter.” The stockier man holding the other end of the chest answered in a lisping drawl. “It’s a sewer.”

“No, it’s the same rat. It only has three legs.”

“You’re mad. The mercury fumes have gotten to you.” I could have cheered for the stocky fellow, with his dull eyes and uncurious mind. What an absolute gem of humanity.

“Am not!”

“Don’t worry so much, Peter.” The third one called back. He was tall and skinny as a beanpole, with a poxy face that was colored in a sickly yellow by the light of the lantern in his hands. “My grampa’s mad and we still love him. Well, I do, my father hates him. But that’s fine because I hate me father.”

“Why are you always on about your family?” The stocky one complained.

“Well, I wouldn’t be a criminal if I had a good home life, would I?”

“That ain’t true. That’s outright bullshit. It’s poverty that’s a predictor of criminal activity.” The first one shot back, blessedly distracted from Argent as she continued to trail behind them.

“Well poverty contributes to an unstable home, but it’s not like every beggar’s a criminal.” Lanky replied, pausing to read a symbol scratched on the walls. The two behind nearly ran into him as he abruptly stopped.

“Both of you. Idiots.” Stocky grumbled.

They continued arguing like that all the way, fighting over the most obscure and inane things and crowding the damp tunnels with the sound of their voices.

They reached a final bend, and the three paused and took out black cloth hoods. Only when they were masked did they continue through.

The ceiling rose up, up high, to a distant and gloomy vault. The tiny passageways of the sewer gave way to a wide cavern, and shadows gave way to the light of dozens of lamps. There was a city down here. When they constructed the sewer they must have completely enclosed part of a river, because here it was, flowing broad and steady through a vast tunnel, and on the banks of that river a swarm of boats were lashed together. Rope bridges and planks spanned between the decks. Lanterns swung from mastheads.

On the shores, black tents and piled boxes had built a shantytown. Everywhere, people were doing business. Everywhere, I saw a flag of nine rats joined at the tails into a wheel.

In the stomp and bustle of the crowd, Argent went entirely undetected. There were rats everywhere. They crowded in the corners and nibbled at the trash. They lifted their heads and squeak as Argent scuttled by.

Everyone here wore a mask. It was some kind of vast criminal market. On sale were every kind of thing, so long as it was stolen, and business was done in a strange silence; instead of talking they would communicate by hand signals. It lent a macabre and serious tone to the whole affair. It also meant I had no clue what was being said.

The three boys set up shop in an empty corner of the market, unpacking vials and oddly shaped bottles, dead specimens in glass cages, body parts pickled in yellow brines. The smell of chemicals was thick on their bodies and they couldn’t help but whisper as they worked.

“Do you think Master Stauber ever comes here himself?”

“Nah. The old bat’s afraid of being caught. It’s hanging for black alchemy.”

The stocky one shhh’d them, conscious of the glares they were attracting from the crowd with their talk. Clearly these were not seasoned criminals.

The last thing they took out was a steel cage, containing a small grayish creature. It had the body of a human but the head and wings of a bat, with a broad noise and two cute fangs, beady eyes, a furless wrinkled brow like an old man’s.

Disinterested, we slipped away, leaving those three to their business and scuttling from crate to barrel, across the tethering lines of tents, moving by the secret routes only a rat can follow to remain above the crowd’s countless feet.

Finally, we found what I was looking for. Jewels. A nervous, skinny man in a crow-nosed mask was seated on a blanket, showing a few glimmering baubles to passersby.

Argent and I scuttled into the shadow of a nearby table, waiting for our opportunity.

It came when a customer in a red-feathered mask paused to examine a necklace, lifting it to the light of the lamp and turning the golden links through his finger. The seller tensed visibly, expecting some slight of hand, and briefly taking his eyes off the trinkets still on the blanket. We lunged.

He caught the flash of silver from the corner of his eye and drew a knife quicker than I had thought possible, flinging it down. Argent melted into a blur of silver and leapt through space. The blade thunked into the ground and she was already at the prize, snatching an emerald earing in her mouth and leaping again, vanishing into the shadows.

The merchant was bewildered, distraught. “That rat!” He shouted, seizing the man in the red-feather mask. Instantly all eyes were on him. Guards in closed helmets pushed through the crowd, seizing him as he stammered and protested his innocence.

All the while, we were smugly hidden from view, prize dangling from our teeth. I made the decision not to press our luck today. It would be better for them not to realize the man was telling the truth.

As we retraced our steps, however, we were caught by the most unlikely of sources.

We were passing by the three alchemists as they haggled in silence over a vial of something greenish and foul, when the bat-faced little creature suddenly pressed itself to the bars of the cage. It reached a hand out, waving to us.

“Hey…” It whispered. “Take me with you.”