They continued on a little distance and found that the layout had changed; instead of a lot of small rooms with the occasional restroom, about half of the rooms were the larger size that held the secret safe. Nearly every single room had a ruins apparition; a few had two. This was much higher than before, which was apparently easily explained by the fact that they were moving into unexplored areas.

About half of those had holes in the wall, but none were as completely filled with stuff as the first. By now, Sophia was pretty sure that these weren't actually hidden wall safes; it didn't make sense to have one in every large room if they were. No, they were some kind of enchanted storage area.

Most were completely empty; of the others, many of the enchantments seemed to have failed at some point. They all held time-damaged cloth and bundles that were no longer magical. Other than the cloth they all seemed to have, the formerly enchanted wall storages held everything from sheets or metal of small metal items to bits of ragged wood or damaged paper. It was like each separate room held different things, though the cloth was clearly the same each time. A few of them even held the twine that was used to tie up the bundles, though there was nothing special about it other than its age.

Xin'ri was overjoyed at even the empty ones, because most still had the disc installed on the inside of the door. Sophia could understand her point; comparing the different sigils might help decode them. She didn't share the joy, however. That felt far too much like homework. Sophia would rather find the things and let Xin'ri figure them out.

The next room they found that actually had a working storage area held glass bottles. A few were empty, but most held liquid, anywhere from a quarter of the way full to completely full. The storage also held cloth, but it was the first one they'd found that was closed and didn't have any bundles. Sophia found that annoying; it meant that the only enchanted things they'd found other than the discs were the bundles from the first room.

To Xin'ri's displeasure, Lan'ti closed the storage without removing anything, not even the disc on the door. It meant Xin'ri would have to wait to analyze it, but it also meant that the liquid, whatever it was, would stay there until Lan'ti figured out what he was going to do with it. No one in his group specialized in mysterious liquids, and that made them a potentially dangerous but also potentially rewarding mystery.

With all the stuff they found, they ended up spending a lot more time carrying stuff back and forth than anyone expected, but they still made more progress than "usual," increasing the amount they'd checked by almost a third. Apparently, being able to just kill the ruins apparitions instead of beating them into slivers of bone made a huge difference in how far they could reach. They didn't have to be nearly as careful, since there was very little time in which they could be surprised by another apparition and even if they were, it was fine if there was only one more.

That explained part of why they hadn't made it very far, but Sophia also figured out that there was more to it than that: they just plain hadn't been exploring for very long. While Los'en was able to guide them directly to the ruins by following a beacon Lan'ti carried, Lan'ti didn't have that advantage. He had to follow the route of the previous expedition, which took them well out of the way. Even once they reached the ruin he was searching for, they all had to pitch in to build the initial campsite.

To Sophia, the area aboveground had looked mostly abandoned, but that was deliberate; other people were extremely unlikely, but monsters were not. It sounded like a story, but some of the expedition members were convinced that being obvious attracted monsters, and since they could set up almost entirely underground, they had. The snow helped hide things, too, since it fell almost every evening. In a few months, they'd be building passageways in the snow drifts, which would be less obvious from a distance, but that wasn't possible until after at least the first blizzard passed.

Building an entire campsite underground, including the vents for smoke so it wouldn't be visible from a distance in the sky, took everyone. On top of that, they had to do a lot of hunting before the snow fell to even have a chance of having enough food for the winter, not to mention gathering whatever they could to supplement the meat before it disappeared under the snow. The previous expedition found a Hollow with berry bushes and some kind of deerlike monster a couple of miles from the ruins, and that would help, but it wasn't enough on its own.

It was hard for Sophia to believe, but they'd been exploring the underground for less than a week when she arrived, other than the few rooms they'd taken over. No wonder they hadn't gotten very far. They'd managed to get past the small area checked by the previous expedition, but the real work was ahead of them.

It looked like it was going to be a rewarding, if confusing, walk in the park so far.

The bundles from the first storage area turned out to be collections of enchanted metal accessories. Two of the packages held leather-lined metal bracers, while the rest held a mix of bracelets, rings, loop earrings, and some odd combinations of bracelets and rings tied together by chains that were clearly intended to slip over the hand in different ways.

Every single piece was enchanted, and it was going to take a while for Xin'ri and her assistant to figure out what they were, especially since Xin'ri preferred to look into the preservation discs. There were a couple of other people who might be able to figure the enchantments out, but they weren't sure how well they'd do. This was already more than they'd expected to find in the entire complex and was certainly enough to justify the expedition, but it wasn't enough for Lan'ti to be satisfied.

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Over the next few days, they explored more and more of the top level of the underground and confirmed that it was exactly that: the top level. Three teams seemed to be the best arrangement if they wanted to explore quickly; Sophia and Dav could each handle the one to two enemies per room, and Lan'ti's team could as well.

Sophia didn't like being separated from Dav, though, and that wasn't the only problem; the moment they ran out of mana, they could no longer handle things alone, and they could move much faster than they could recover mana. Before long, it was clear that a single large group was actually better. That way, they could rotate who was handling the monsters based on available mana and take their time examining the rooms. Taking things back to the camp pulled people away often enough that three teams was difficult to manage anyway; realistically, one of the three was on their way to the camp at any given time.

They even found another route into and out of the area, though this time both the "up" and the "down" were choked with dirt and rubble. The two sets of stairs were nearly a mile away from the other known entrance. While the area near the second entrance didn't look likely to collapse, they gave it a wide berth anyway. All of the rooms near that entrance were the same small empty rooms as near the one they'd entered, anyway.

Seeing the collapsed rubble on the stairs made Sophia paranoid about the weight above her, but she couldn't find any obvious weaknesses or cracks and there weren't any other places that had collapsed. Lan'ti seemed confident that what they saw was a combination of events that happened on the surface and dirt slowly filling in the spaces over the centuries. It didn't make Sophia entirely comfortable, but it was certainly true that there was no reason for any of it to fall down now when it had lasted more than sixteen hundred years already. Maybe it would, someday, but the odds of it happening while she was underground were low.

That thought helped, a bit. Most of the time she tried not to think about it. She even succeeded, more often than not. It was definitely a good thing that she wasn't claustrophobic.

Dav's new Overflowing Health Call was surprisingly useful; while no one underground was hurt, there were injuries aboveground almost every day. They'd be attacked by a surprisingly large number of monsters, someone would be thrown by a horse, or the side of a hill would collapse and almost bury someone as they went by.

It was a continuing series of bad incidents and accidents that would have put a lot of the aboveground crew out of action if they hadn't had regular healing available. As it was, a few of them started to mutter about the area above the ruins being haunted. No one ever saw anything suspicious, but Orwin was convinced that there was a sneaky ruins apparition behind everything.

If it had been anyone other than Orwin, some of the others might have believed him. As it was, they laughed uneasily before dismissing the claim every time.

Underground, despite exploring the rest of the top floor, they only found one other untouched storage area. In addition to the usual cloth, all it held was paper, stacks and stacks of paper. The paper shimmered with arcane mana, unfocused and clearly ready to be used.

"It's magical," Xin'ri announced when she saw it. "But it doesn't seem to be enchanted. There's no form to it. I'm not sure what it's for."

"It's blank runepaper, of course," Sophia shook her head. How did Xin'ri not know that? Didn't she work with runes?

Xin'ri turned to Sophia and raised an eyebrow doubtfully. "Runepaper?"

Apparently she didn't. Huh. Sophia shook her head to clear it. "Yeah, runepaper. It's great for single-use runescripts and testing before you make the real thing; it's easier to make than a proper permanent runescript. This is decent paper; the mana concentration's good and it's evenly distributed. I can't tell which scribing method it's intended for from the mana layout, which means it's decent."

Sophia had used a lot of runepaper over the years. Her father bought it in several different grades, all the way from basically just cheap copier paper to exceedingly expensive runepaper that could be merged into larger sheets and handle runescripts up to Tier Fifty. She'd never used the really good stuff, but what she was looking at was pretty similar to what she usually used; anything worse quality than that was really only useful for finding defects in the runscript's manaflow.

Xin'ri stared at Sophia for a long moment before she spoke. "You can use paper for runescripts? How? There's not enough there to carry the mana!"

Sophia blinked, then reached into her pack. She had to dig a bit before she found the right pad of infused runepaper and her manaink. Once she did, she silently but quickly drew a quick runescript. It was a basically useless runescript; all it did was make the mana fly up into the air and sparkle like fireworks. It wasn't even visible to anyone without manasight.

It was also the only runescript she could manage to draw from memory. Sure, she knew a runic language, but that didn't mean she didn't have to work out all the paths and balancing equations for whatever she was going to write. New runescripts were a pain in the butt, but this one she already knew. It would be good enough.

When she was finished, she tore off the sheet of paper and tucked the pad and ink back in her pack, then set the paper on the floor. A glance at Xin'ri said that the fox-eared woman was still watching, even if she hadn't said anything at all since Sophia started. "Watch this."

Xin'ri's expression was absolutely worth it. Her mouth fell open as she watched tiny bits of mana fly a solid five feet into the air, then drift down like burning embers that went out as they fell.

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