Episode 047| Shadow_001 Knows This Place

Kaiyuan Year 1010, January 4 · 9:36 p.m. · Saint Tranya, Underground · Beyond the Line

That welded-shut door, once Lika was through it, closed again at his back — not really welded, just the 2 men minding the door shoving the whole armour plate back into place, flush to the seam, as if this door had never opened at all.

Inside the door and outside it were two different worlds.

The market out there was order inside chaos, held together by an unspoken understanding. In here it was not like that. The lamps were fixed, and white, strung row on row off a proper power line, no flicker. The floor was level, the walls were straight, and the people standing to either side of the passage didn't run stalls or hawk goods — they only stood, each with something close to hand, and not farm tools reworked into weapons either, but the genuine article.

This place didn't run on understanding. It ran on rules, on there being someone who set the rules.

Lika was walked deeper down the passage between 2 underlings. As he went he was filing the place away — but halfway in, he found that half his attention wasn't on this passage at all.

It was that knot of cold.

---

Shadow_001 was off.

From the moment it came through the door, it had stopped holding obediently to half a step off his rear left. It had dropped back, fallen to a full step off his rear left, as if something behind it were dragging at it, keeping it from matching Lika's pace.

Of everything Lika had taken in and put to use, not one had ever "failed to keep up." He gave an order, and they fell into place, never short-changing him. But Shadow_001 was short-changing him right now — its attention had been hooked away by some direction in this place.

Within his sense of bearing, Lika quietly gave it the simplest of orders.

Keep up.

That knot of cold faltered a moment, then, half a beat late, slid back to half a step off his rear left.

Half a beat late. The very same half-beat as the time in the Frozen Reach Instance, before it went down, when it had stared at that Rift and Lika had called it and it hadn't turned its head at once.

---

Lika remembered that pull just before they'd left — it had faced straight down, the direction of #002.

But this time it was different.

This time the direction it was hooked toward wasn't straight down. It was at a slant, off deeper into the passage and further to the left, a direction that split clean away from #002. In his head Lika laid the 2 lines side by side: #002 was directly below and to the south, 2,300 metres; the line Shadow_001 was fixed on now was far shallower, far more skewed, somewhere within the range of this underground city itself.

It wasn't fixed on #002.

It was fixed on something here.

---

The string drawn taut in Lika's chest tightened a notch.

He did a thing he hadn't done once since taking Shadow_001 in — pushed his sense of bearing into the deepest reaches of its body, to touch those few fragments that he, even the owner, couldn't pry open: a row of backs bent down beneath the ice, that one mark turned half a turn the wrong way, that sound in a woman's voice he couldn't make out.

The last time he'd touched them was beneath the ice in the Frozen Reach.

This time, he touched them beneath the city of Saint Tranya — and those few fragments stirred.

[Fragment · read request]
[Privilege: owner]
[Result: cannot read · source unauthorized]
[Note: source signal · amplified here]

Cannot read. Still cannot read.

But this time there was one more line at the end: source signal, amplified here.

In the Frozen Reach, he couldn't pry these few fragments open. Here, he still couldn't — but these few fragments themselves, in this place, had turned "loud." Like a radio that elsewhere gave only static, carried to one particular spot, the static suddenly threaded through with the faintest ghost of a tune.

---

Shadow_001 was something he'd snapshotted, beneath the ice at the farthest south of the Frozen Reach, off a thing that had no human shape. Where that thing had come from, what the him of the past had written into it, Lika still couldn't pry open to this day.

But this thing that had come from the Frozen Reach, carried down beneath the city of Saint Tranya, "knew" this place.

Those few locked fragments inside its body, and something beneath this city, were of one and the same source.

Lika had pieced together no end of pictures. He knew 2 points didn't amount to much; it took 3 points before a shape began to come.

#002, the him of the past had buried beneath this city. Shadow_001's fragments pointed to another thing beneath this city — something earlier, a source that even the him of the past had had to "copy" down.

They were both beneath this city. Both in this dark under his feet.

---

"We're here." The underling holding him stopped.

At the end of the passage was another door. This one wasn't welded shut; it stood open, light coming through from inside. The man at its edge stood straighter than anyone outside, and the way he looked at Lika was heavier too than the sentry's, than the one at the door who'd weighed him up.

Just as Lika was pushed toward that door, the knot of cold half a step off his rear left fell a half-beat behind again.

It wasn't watching the door. Its attention was still stuck to that slanting-downward direction from before — stuck to somewhere deeper, darker in this underground city, to the thing there that shared its source.

Lika stepped through the door. But in his chest, he filed that direction away.

【Ch. 047 End · Saint Tranya, Underground, Beyond the Line】