Slowly, he let the aches in his body drag him back down. His throat was dry and painful, his ribs bruised, his back aching. He covered his eyes with trembling fingers and looked between them at the ceiling.

The circle of runes glowed blue, bathing them in a watery light. He should stand up and check out his surroundings. He could sense that Orthos was still alive, but still unconscious and weak. They could all still be in danger.

Breathe. He had to keep his madra under control.

As a matter of habit, he focused on the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel cycling technique. It dug at his spirit like he was trying to drill a hole in his own heart, and it felt like metal bands were tightening around his lungs, but it gave him something steady to focus on.

He inhaled and exhaled in revolution after revolution until he could make himself believe that the fight was over. The enemies were gone.

Now that he had a moment to think, the memories closed over him like the icy cold ocean of Ghostwater.

Yerin's scarred face as she tried to reach the portal to save him.

Renfei, poised to speak, as a red line grew down from the top of her head.

His Thousand-Mile Cloud dissipating to mist.

The two halves of Little Blue's habitat lying in the sand.

Renfei's death hit him harder than he'd expected. He hadn't known her well, trusted her, or particularly liked her. But seeing her killed in front of him, so casually...so easily...

She was a Truegold in full armor, and she went from alive to dead in a moment. She didn't deserve that.

And that could have been him, just as easily. More so.

Then there was Yerin.

What was happening to her on the outside? It couldn't be worse than what was happening in here, so at least she'd been spared that, but he couldn't help but run through the possibilities. Without Renfei, Bai Rou could have decided he'd be better off without his apprentices. Mercy and Yerin wouldn't be a match for him, even together; Mercy was only a Lowgold. He could kill them both and say they'd all died with Renfei, and Eithan was the only one who would ask any questions.

Ever since losing his arm, he would sometimes wake up and forget. He'd try to reach for something and see the skeletal stretch of white madra and the sight would strike him as wrong. That wasn't his arm. It would take his brain a moment to piece together the truth.

Separating from Yerin felt the same. Looking down the hallway without seeing her was like glancing down and seeing his arm missing.

A worried chirp shook him out of his cycling trance, and he pulled his hand away from his face. He was surprised to discover his fingers were damp, and hurriedly swiped at his eyes. His father would have given him a lecture for crying in public. There was no one here to see, but it was hard to shake the old fear that he'd be caught in a shameful position.

Little Blue was barely visible against the ground, looking up at him in the azure light. She was pale and thinly spread; he could see right through her.

Only then did he realize that his soul felt much better. He still had almost nothing in either core, but his channels had been scrubbed and cleansed. While he wouldn't want to fight, at least he wouldn't risk permanent spiritual injury with a single Empty Palm.

Carefully, Lindon lowered himself back down to the floor and held out his palm to Little Blue. “Gratitude,” he said, as she clambered up to his wrist.

She'd done what she could for him. And Orthos would not recover on his own.

Yerin might not be with him, but he wasn't alone. These two needed his help.

“Are you hungry?” he asked softly. The Sylvan Riverseed let out a long, slow tone that sounded like a flute.

“I'll find us something,” Lindon said, glancing over at Orthos. “This place was built by a Monarch. There are treasures in here we can't imagine.”

His voice echoed back to him in the corridor.

He picked up the Eye, but pouring madra into it didn't do anything useful. It only pointed him to distant locations; too far away to be any help. Still, he carried it with him just in case. The rest of his belongings stayed with Orthos.

He felt naked without the pack on his back, but the almost imperceptible weight of Little Blue on his shoulder gave him comfort.

Together, they walked down the sloping hallway.

Very quickly, he discovered that the corridor was not empty. There were keyholes like the one at the entrance every few yards. His first few discoveries were causes for excitement; if these were all exits, then he would be able to leave without risking an encounter with the dragon-girl or the fanged fish.

Excitement gave way to disappointment every time. The first time the wall melted away around his gemstone, it revealed a closet packed with buckets. Many of the metal buckets were rusted through, the wooden ones rotted away. There was a puddle of something that smelled metallic in one corner.

The next door was empty except for a pile of shredded and half-burned paper.

The next was a broad storage room with hooks dangling from the ceiling. That was all; just empty hooks.

The fourth contained bedframes. No beds, only frames.

He found a food closet with all the packages torn open, their contents devoured. There was a massive, empty warehouse that looked like it was sized to hold whole ships. But no matter how he explored it, he found no other exit.

He'd been exploring for what he guessed to be an hour by the time he spotted the end of the hall. It had stopped sloping downward long before, so now it was just a straight hallway with a flat wall at the end.

It was distant enough that he guessed there were sixteen more doors between him and the end. He had been trying to visit every door in order, so that he could easily keep track of which ones he'd checked and hadn't, but so far he'd found only garbage and rot.

By this point, his thirst weighed on every thought, his stomach growled, and even this short walk had left his legs soft and trembling. If he couldn't find anything in these rooms, he'd have to return to Orthos and go out the front door. If the gold dragon-girl was still waiting for them...well, he'd have to risk that.

With time pressing on him, he skipped the last rows of doors and moved right to the one at the end of the hall. If there was any one door that might have something in it, this would be the one.

He opened the door, and purple light radiated out, clashing with the endless blue.

The light in the room came from a knee-high well of worked stone, which overflowed with some glowing purple liquid. It spilled over the edges, pooling on the floor, trickling away into grates. As Lindon watched, a single drop of the purple liquid fell from overhead and landed in the pool with an audible plop.

The room wasn't large, perhaps ten paces to a side, with floor-to-ceiling shelves against each of the three walls. All of the shelves were packed with piles of...junk.

There was a chaos in the air that he felt in his spirit, a mix of brief impressions with conflicting purposes. Random light flashed from one junk-pile or another, giving off colored sparks.

As he moved closer, he saw that some of the piles were metal, others wood. Still others were smooth and thin, as though made out of eggshell. Most of the surfaces had script-circles inscribed in them: mostly to contain madra, but others for a dozen other functions. Only when he turned one over and exposed a last trickle of madra fading to essence did he realize what he was looking at.

Constructs. This was the storage room for constructs.

Their spirits had all faded away over the years since Ghostwater had been closed, except for a few bits of madra preserved by scripts. The fully spiritual constructs would have vanished entirely, leaving only the physical vessels of those bound to some material.