Chapter 178 — The Tenth Floor

Chapter 178: Chapter 178 — The Tenth Floor

They broke camp early on what Arlen now understood to be the eighth day since leaving the surface — three days through the familiar upper stretch, two full days apiece through Eight and Nine’s considerable expanse, and now, finally, the last stretch toward whatever waited beyond.

"Final descent," Ilyana said, checking her gear with unhurried thoroughness. "Longer walk than the rest, if I recall correctly. Ground’s different too, the closer you get."

She wasn’t wrong. The passage widened gradually as they walked, the rough, uneven stone of Floor Nine giving way to something smoother, more deliberately worked, until the ramp itself finally emerged — wide, gently sloped, worn glass-smooth by what must have been years of steady, heavy traffic.

Arlen felt his own anticipation sharpening with every step, Kess’s earlier promise settling into him with genuine weight. Nothing quite prepares you properly.

He stepped off the ramp’s final stretch, and found himself, exactly as promised, entirely unprepared.

The floor didn’t open into a chamber. It opened into a world.

Light — genuine, warm, daylight-colored light — spilled from some source high overhead that Arlen couldn’t properly identify, filtered through what looked, impossibly, like actual clouds drifting slow and lazy across a ceiling so distant it might as well have been sky. Below it stretched a settlement that dwarfed anything he’d imagined possible this deep beneath the earth — stone buildings rising two and three stories, proper streets worn smooth by generations of foot traffic, a market square already bustling despite whatever hour it actually was, and, threading through the whole vast expanse, a river considerably larger than anything he’d seen on Floor Six, spanned by actual bridges.

He stood at the ramp’s base, entirely still, and simply stared.

"Told you words wouldn’t do it justice," Osric said, watching his expression with quiet amusement.

"This is—" Arlen struggled for the words, and found none of them adequate. "This is a city."

"It is," Ilyana said. "The only floor in the entire Upper Depths built like this. Every route through the fragmented floors above eventually leads down to this exact same ramp, no matter which particular passages a party happened to favor along the way. One floor, whole and entire, the way none of the others quite manage."

"How is that possible?"

"Nobody’s entirely certain," Osric admitted. "Some theorize the floor was simply carved differently from the start, by whoever or whatever originally shaped this place. Others think something about its position makes fragmentation impossible, the way certain kinds of stone won’t take a certain kind of stress. I’ve heard theories I don’t find remotely convincing too, so take your pick."

Kess clapped him on the shoulder, grinning at his evident astonishment. "Welcome to the only proper city you’ll find without walking back to the surface. Come on. Introductions can wait. I want real food before anything else."

They made their way into the market square, and Arlen found himself, walking through streets that felt, despite everything he knew about where he actually stood, entirely indistinguishable from any surface settlement he’d ever visited — vendors calling out over stalls of fresh produce he had no idea how anyone grew this deep underground, a blacksmith’s forge ringing with familiar, honest labor, a modest guild outpost with its own quest board already crowded with postings.

"Where does the food come from?" he asked, genuinely bewildered, studying a stall selling what looked like perfectly ordinary vegetables.

"Cultivated, mostly, in caverns further along the river," Grennig said. "Some of it’s imported from the surface too, hauled down specifically for trade. This floor supports itself well enough that plenty of people never bother going home at all."

"People live here? Permanently?"

"Some do," Ilyana said. "Merchants, mostly. Craftsmen who’ve found it more profitable to set up shop this deep than compete with everyone else up top. A few retired adventurers who simply never left." She gestured toward a modest, well-kept building near the square’s edge, its sign carved with a stylized archway. "Guild outpost. We’ll resupply there before pushing further. You’ll want proper provisions for what’s beyond this point — Region Three doesn’t forgive careless packing the way the upper floors sometimes do."

They spent the better part of the afternoon moving through the settlement, and Arlen found himself, cataloguing everything with the same careful, methodical attention he gave every genuine discovery, increasingly astonished by the sheer, unlikely permanence of the place — an apothecary considerably better stocked than Bellwyn’s own modest shop, a jeweler working delicate settings under lantern light, a cartographer’s stall papered with maps that Arlen suspected, given everything Osric had explained, represented only a fraction of the actual truth above.

He lingered longest at the apothecary, curious whether the deeper Depths’ materials fetched different prices than the upper floors, and found the proprietor — a sharp-eyed halfling woman entirely unbothered by his questions — willing to talk at length about what actually moved through her shop.

"Region Three material, mostly, this deep," she said, gesturing at shelves considerably more varied than Bellwyn’s. "River creatures, crystal-touched things, the occasional oddity someone hauls up from further down than they probably should have gone. You’ll find prices run steeper here than the surface shops, given the distance everything’s already traveled just to reach this counter."

"Worth it, for the convenience?"

"Depends who you ask. Adventurers pushing deeper certainly think so. Nobody wants to haul three days’ worth of harvest all the way back to the surface just to sell it, when they could turn around and dive straight back in instead."

Arlen filed that away with genuine interest, already turning over what his own accumulated materials from the past week might fetch here compared to Bellwyn’s familiar counter.

"Every route through the fragmented floors ends up here eventually," he said later, turning the thought over aloud as they walked toward the guild outpost. "That’s why it feels so different. It’s not just another floor. It’s the one place in the whole upper Depths that everyone, no matter which particular path they favored getting here, actually has in common."

"Exactly that," Osric said, something approving in his weathered expression. "First time I saw it, took me the better part of a day just to stop staring. You’re managing better than I did."

"I don’t feel like I’m managing particularly well," Arlen admitted, still watching the distant, impossible ceiling with open wonder.

Kess laughed, warm and genuine. "Nobody manages it well, the first time. Give it an hour. You’ll start noticing the ordinary parts eventually — the smell of the bakery, the noise of the market, the fact that half the people here complain about prices exactly the same way people do on the surface. Makes it feel considerably less like magic and considerably more like simply another place worth knowing."

They resupplied properly at the guild outpost, Ilyana handling the practical details with brisk, familiar efficiency while Arlen browsed the modest shelf of regional maps the outpost kept for sale — Region Three’s rough shape sketched out in considerably less confident detail than anything covering the floors above.

"Incomplete," the clerk admitted, following his gaze. "Region Three’s still being properly charted, past this point. You’ll want a guide who’s actually walked it, more than you’ll want the map itself."

"Good thing I’ve got five of those," Arlen said, glancing toward where Ilyana’s team had gathered near the outpost’s entrance.

They made camp that evening within the settlement’s outer edge, a modest inn considerably more comfortable than any dungeon camp Arlen had yet managed, and he found himself, lying awake despite his exhaustion, still turning over the sheer, unlikely scale of what he’d walked through that day.

One floor, whole and entire, he thought, watching the distant, impossible light finally begin dimming toward something like evening. Everything above it fragments. This is where it all comes together.

He fell asleep eventually, the settlement’s distant, ordinary noise settling around him — a dog barking somewhere, a late merchant calling his wares, the patient, steady murmur of a river running through the heart of a city that had no business existing this deep beneath the world, and yet, somehow, plainly and undeniably did.

Tomorrow, Ilyana had told him, they would push past it — into Region Three properly, and whatever waited beyond the last familiar ramp any of them had ever needed to walk.