Umbra did not take them back to the surface.
The route she found passed through an old service gallery that climbed only two levels before turning west, crossing a section of the complex that had never been fully incorporated into the Reconstruction Archive.
That became obvious almost immediately.
The metal plates disappeared from the walls, the mana channels became older and more irregular, and correction numbers stopped appearing on the doors.
In some stretches, Obrin's original stone remained exposed, marked by tool scratches and handwritten inscriptions left by workers who had probably never imagined someone would be reading them one hundred seventy years later.
The sound of the city remembering continued above them, but it had changed.
The footsteps were no longer repeating only the day of the disaster.
Some ran in the opposite direction.
Nonexistent doors opened before the moment they were supposed to.
