第 041 Episode| The Shaft Has No Bottom

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 7:18 p.m. · Saint Tranya · Information Research Substation No. 10, Maintenance Shaft

Lika didn't take the front door.

The front door had card readers, cameras, a duty roster. The place he was headed wasn't on any roster — he was going down, down beneath that coordinate marked #002, and that coordinate was tagged "███ metres underground," so deep that Spectra had blacked out the number itself.

He worked his way around to the maintenance shaft in the furthest corner of Substation No. 10. He'd swapped the shaft cover himself, 3 years ago; the scan lock logged it under a staff number that didn't exist. The cover came up, and below it was a metal ladder, dropping down into the dark. A foot-light came on every few metres, one rung at a time, sinking lower and lower, sinking past where the eye could count.

Half a step to his rear left, that knot of cold, 1 degree lower than the air, stopped with him at the shaft mouth. Shadow_001 had no body after the Instance, but Lika knew it was there — it was staring down toward the bottom of the shaft, the exact same stance as the time it had stared at that crevice in the Frozen Reach Instance.

"There's something down there," Lika said. "I know."

He stepped onto the metal ladder first.

---

Lika had lived in this city long enough, long enough that he'd thought he had every layer of its underside figured out.

The first stretch down was the municipal maintenance level — pipework, distribution boxes, numbering he could read with his eyes shut. Further down were the tunnel levels of the 7 maglev lines, with trains still running at this hour, the metal ladder lit every so often by an arc passing beneath it, a blue-white light leaking up through the gaps under his feet, once every few seconds. Further down still was the cooling pipe network of the Source-Stone power plant, the whole wall warm, the things inside the pipes shaking low.

All of this he knew. All of this was on the drawings.

In the corner of his retina, the brain-chip interface ran a depth readout —

[Current Depth: 412 metres underground]
[Cross-Reference Official Level Map: Source-Stone Cooling Layer · lowest]
[#002 coordinate: further down · depth ███]

Source-Stone Cooling Layer, the lowest.

The official drawings ended here. In everyone's understanding, this city went no deeper than this layer. Below it were the foundations of the old city, the dead rock that had been pressing there before this city was ever built — no one would go down to a place like that to repair anything.

But the metal ladder didn't stop.

---

Lika stopped on the rung at 412 metres and looked down.

The foot-lights were still coming on. One rung, one rung, one rung, going down, with no intention of reaching a bottom. This maintenance shaft — back in the day, he'd only run it as far as the Source-Stone Cooling Layer. He remembered it perfectly clearly; he'd welded the ladder by hand, and finished it off at the platform of the cooling layer.

But now, below that platform, the ladder went on growing downward.

He crouched, and put his flashlight on the seam of that stretch of ladder he'd "never welded."

He knew the welder's hand. When he welded a thing he'd tack it 3 times to position it before running the whole line — wasteful, ugly, but solid. The seam in front of him: tacked 3 times, then run the full length.

Exactly the way he welded.

But he'd never welded a single rung below 412 metres.

His temple twinged once — the same place, the same kind of pain as every time he ran up against something the him of the past had left behind.

Him again. This road down had been walked first, laid first, by the him of the past. Even the ladder had been welded down by his own hands.

---

The air going down began to feel wrong.

Past the Source-Stone Cooling Layer, the temperature should have dropped all the way — the old city's foundations were dead rock, colder the deeper you went; that was common sense. But the air in the shaft grew warmer instead, one rung at a time, unnaturally warm, and it carried a smell he couldn't put a name to, like a room no one had opened in a long while, and like the faint scorch of some piece of electronics about to overheat.

He stopped, and called up the access record for this maintenance shaft under his own name. Just 1 entry: Kaiyuan Year 1007, cover swapped, ladder welded, run as far as the cooling layer, 11 minutes, clean.

But beneath that 1 entry, there was a 2nd pressed under it.

[Access Record · This Maintenance Shaft]
[1: Kaiyuan Year 1007 · Staff No. ████ · Duration 11 minutes]
[2: March 11, Kaiyuan Year 925 · Staff No. L.K.S._Core · Duration: ——]

March 11, 925. That day again.

The duration column was empty — no end time. As if 85 years ago, after the him of the past went down this shaft, that access had still, to this very moment, not finished.

Lika stared at that dash for 2 seconds, then closed the window.

---

Lika didn't turn back.

He went down. 412 metres, 500, 600. The foot-lights lit up one rung at a time beneath his feet and went out above his head, as if someone had gone the length of this shaft, lighting each lamp ahead of time for him.

[Current Depth: 731 metres underground]
[Official Level Map: no data]
[#002 coordinate: further down]

No data.

He'd officially stepped beyond this city's drawings. Above his head was the city he'd lived in for who knew how many years and thought he had figured out; beneath his feet was a stretch of shaft that no official drawing had ever charted, yet that someone — someone who welded ladders with his own technique — had run all the way to the bottom.

That knot of cold shifted down a rung, from half a step to his rear left. Shadow_001 went a step ahead of him and stopped on the rung below, its head turned toward the bottom of the shaft.

It was urging him on.

Lika looked up once. The last foot-light still visible was far above, above the 731 metres, small as a star about to go out. Then he lowered his head and looked toward the black at the bottom of the shaft.

The foot-lights were still coming on below. One rung, one rung, one rung.

This shaft, the shaft he'd welded, had no bottom.

【Ch. 041 End · Saint Tranya, Information Research Substation No. 10 Maintenance Shaft → beyond the city's underground drawings】