[Cass]
They worked by pulse and chalk. Rilka mapped the glow returning through floor veins, her lines tightening into a lattice of arrows that pointed toward the crystal pillars below. Karrek read the lattice like a forge diagram and started barking orders that turned a cavern into a workshop. Eshna set up cots along the perimeter and forbade anyone from staying within the humming zone longer than the sand in a narrow glass dropshell. Cass moved between them all, the bond in his chest ticking time the way a metronome ticks a song into order.
The new ore was the first hurdle. Echo ore. It looked like stone had swallowed lightning and forgot to chew. Thin veins ran through it in jagged angles, and if you held a piece to your ear you could hear a faint ring that matched the mountain's slow heartbeat. The miners learned fast to wrap it in damp cloth. Raw, it made hands go numb. If you cracked it wrong, it sang so loud your teeth hurt for an hour.
Karrek weighed a fist-sized chunk in his palm and grunted. "Stone that hums. If the world keeps making jokes, I'm not laughing."
"It's not a joke," Eshna said, binding a cut across a miner's forearm. The man's fingers twitched in rhythm with the ore in Karrek's hand. She pulled the cloth tighter. "It's a hazard. No unwrapped ore near the sleeping dens. No ore on bare skin. And if anyone starts to hear music when there isn't any, you come to me before your brain turns to echo cheese."
Rilka, crouched beside them, didn't look up from her slate. "It's not music," she murmured. "It's instructions."
Karrek squinted at Cass. "You understand your little map witch?"
"Enough," Cass said. He took the ore and held it close to his chest. The bond stuttered, then steadied. The ore's ring slipped into the ward's cadence like a wheel finding a groove. "It fits. We can route the flow with this. Build ribs for the conduit so it doesn't collapse when we push power."
Karrek's jaw tightened. "Ribs I can do. A spine, too. But the heart?" He jerked his chin toward the lower cavern. "That's on you."
"On me," Cass agreed, and the bond tugged like a leash that didn't mind being called by name.
They laid out the plan on stone in charcoal and chalk. Three rings around the Root Conduit Interface. Outer ring of stone braces keyed with Echo ore struts. Middle ring of carved channels to bleed off excess resonance into ground sinks Rilka marked as "quiet pockets." Inner ring of shaped crystal from the shattered stal called glassbone, shaved thin by Torv and the young smiths until the sheets flexed in their hands like brittle skin. At the core, set on Meriv's resin pedestal, the Resonant Core: the Guardian fragment Cass had torn from the Spore Guardian weeks ago, ground and re-bound with fungus lacquer until it pulsed to the Ward's rhythm instead of against it.
Meriv oversaw the central assembly with a craftsman's contempt for conversation. He spoke only when something would break, and never earlier than necessary. "You will overfeed it," he said at last, when the inner ring came alive with a pale, disciplined glow. "If you do not stagger the bands, the breath will seize."
Karrek rolled his eyes and staggered the bands. The glow steadied. Meriv didn't smile, which was how he smiled.
Eshna set the hourglass on a flat stone near the rim of the Interface. "Sixty minutes exposure," she said, tapping the glass. "You promised me. I don't care if the mountain itself starts singing your mother's lullaby. You come out when the sand runs out."
Cass almost told her he didn't remember his mother's lullaby, only the sound of machines that pretended to be gentle. He swallowed that ghost and nodded. "Sixty minutes."
Rilka handed him a chalk, already worn to a nub. "If the lines shift, you redraw them. Don't trust the old marks. The floor forgets."
"Then we remind it," Cass said. He took the chalk and the spear and the hourglass and led the first crew down.
The stair to Level -4 felt shorter than yesterday. The glass underfoot remembered his steps and shivered beneath them like a sleeping animal recognizing a familiar weight. At the cut where he had pierced the membrane, the circle had healed smooth, but when he pressed the spearhead against it, it yielded in a soft ripple and opened without cracking. Rilka's breath caught. Karrek muttered something unrepeatable that meant he did not like magic that learned.
Inside the Interface chamber, the crystal pillars breathed. The currents between them dampened as the crew filed in, as if the room held a breath to listen. Cass set the hourglass on the nearest brace. Sand began to fall. He breathed with it. Counted.
"Outer ring," he said. "Set."
Karrek's team dropped Echo struts into the anchors they had carved yesterday and hammered their pins home with wrapped mallets. The pillars' light twitched with each blow, then aligned, like a row of soldiers correcting posture.
"Middle ring."
Rilka's chalk lines became cuts became channels. Resin flowed like tar along them, black and glossy, then flashed green when Meriv brushed the liquid with a brush made of shaved glassbone hairs. The resin didn't smoke. It purred.
"Inner ring."
Torv and the young smiths lifted the glassbone sheets into their slots. They clicked into place with a sound like ice singing on a lake. Light crawled across their surfaces, then settled, the sheets humming in counterpoint to the pillars' bass.
The hourglass shed a quarter of its sand. Cass stepped to the pedestal and laid his hand on the Resonant Core. The bond in his chest stood up like a dog that had smelled blood and sunlight at once. He pushed. The core pushed back.
The chamber brightened without being brighter. The currents between the pillars stopped looking like currents and started looking like roads on a map that extended beyond the walls. Data overlays that weren't text scrolled through the outer ring in pulses and pauses. Cass didn't read them with eyes. He felt them in his sternum. Pressure vectors. Infection flow. Shard stress.
Karrek shaded his eyes and swore again. "Tell me how to swing a hammer at that."
"By swinging it where I point," Cass said, sweat beading along his spine. "Anchor two is drifting. Brace. Now."
The hammer fell. The drift stopped. The hourglass dropped another finger of sand.
"Eshna will drag you out by your ear if you take one grain more," Karrek said under his breath.
"Then swing faster," Cass said, and the core pulsed and the bond yanked and the map of roads shifted again.
They worked like that for half an hour. Move and brace and bleed and set. Every time the Interface bucked, Rilka found a line to soothe it. Every time the outer ring sang too loud, Meriv painted a hair-thin thread of resin that ate the shout and returned a whisper. Torv's hands bled through the cloth as he held a shivering pane of glassbone steady while Karrek locked it into its tooth. Cass kept one hand on the core and one hand on the spear, because it helped to hold something that killed while you tried to build something that would not.
When the hourglass was down to its last thumb, Eshna's voice carried from the corridor. "Cass."
"Two more braces," he said, jaw tight. "We're close."
"You promised me sixty," she said, closer now, the words cool as water on a burn.
"We die if I let go now," he said, and the core made a liar of him by bucking hard enough to tear his hand away. Pain bit through his ribs like a dog finally finding skin through cloth. He staggered, dropped to one knee, and tasted copper.
Eshna was there, faster than anyone, one hand on his shoulder, the other on the hourglass. She turned it. The sand did not obey. It kept falling to the bottom. The chamber did not care for mercy as much as it cared for rhythm.
"Hold him," she said, and Karrek's hands were on Cass's back, steady as anvils.
Cass shoved his palm back to the core. "Last brace," he rasped. "Now."
Torv drove the anchor home. The chamber's roads snapped into coherence. The breathing of the pillars slowed to something a human could sleep with. The currents between them did not vanish. They narrowed, became lanes rather than floods.
The hourglass emptied. The room did not collapse.
"Cut power," Cass said, and Meriv did something with the resin brush that pulled the glow back into the inner ring like a tide leaving a flat beach. The light stayed in the crystal, and the crystal stayed in its slots, and the world did not crack open beneath them.
Karrek let go. So did Eshna. Cass took his hand off the core and the pain in his chest became a dull ache that was almost a relief.
Rilka exhaled a laugh that came out as a sob. "It listened," she whispered. "It listened to us."
"Now we see if it listens to the world," Cass said. He pressed two fingers to the inner ring, not to guide, only to ask. The Interface answered by dropping a single line of meaning into the bond.
Capacity: Limited bridge achievable.
Risk: Cross-contamination high without filter.
Filter: Unavailable.
Rilka leaned closer. "Filter?"
Meriv's face creased, the lines of an old man who had learned long ago how to pretend he did not love hope. "We'll need a sieve for poison that isn't a poison. A pattern-breaker. A design."
Karrek spat in the dust. "In words that aren't altar talk?"
"An ear that knows when not to hear," Meriv said. "A door that knows when not to open."
Cass's jaw set. "Then we build an ear."
They hauled the gear back up in shifts. Eshna forced Cass to drink two bitter vials and stare at a point on her finger until the buzzing behind his eyes went from a swarm to one persistent fly. Rilka staggered into her nest of slates and began drawing diagrams of circles inside circles that looked like flowers if flowers were made by engineers. Karrek sketched rough arches on a chunk of slate and wrote the word ribs and then a question mark big enough to make Torv grin for the first time in three days.
By evening, the Interface's hum had settled into the same slow rhythm as the ward above. The cavern felt balanced. The Spore Ward's pulse came back to Cass through the core like a heartbeat bounced off stone. For a few minutes, he stood between them and let the two beats hold him upright.
News from the world snuck in by other paths. Not a leak with his name. Not a screenshot with his face. Only echoes that traveled down forgotten routes and sang in stone for anyone who knew how to listen.
Herald bulletin shards whispered that the Five Guilds had finally named themselves. The Crown of Recall. The Anvil Line. The Verdant Choir. The Radiant Coil. The Pale Banner. Each had a symbol, a set of roads, a list of enemies. Each swore they would solve the infection by owning it, by burning it, by burying it, by bottling it, by bargaining with it. The bulletin did not mention an underground ward or a dead lord under a mountain. It shouted only of camps and marches and oaths shouted under torn flags.
Forum chatter turned that into noise.
[ScoutGlass]: "Global flag raised: Veinworks detected. Anyone know what that means?"
[CoalDriver]: "Radiant Coil says it's an Anvil Line prototype. They're bluffing again."
[WheatAndSalt]: "Verdant Choir claims it's their river cleanse. My cousin saw green light in the water."
[IronFist88]: "It means the game is cheating for someone. Same as always."
[Nocti]: "It means a shard learned to listen."
Cass did not read those lines. If he could have, he would have smiled only with his eyes.
What he did hear was Rilka's chalk. Scritch, scritch, steady, a little lighter now that her fingers had stopped shaking. What he did smell was the faint sweetness from Eshna's kettles where she boiled down a new mix of herbs to chase Echo-sickness out of stubborn skulls. What he did feel was Karrek's next brace slot into the wall with that satisfying bone-deep click that meant a plan had turned into a thing you could lean on.
Late, he walked alone to the old river ledge where the eel skull hung above the dark. The torches within the skull were out. The socket eyes were empty and kind. He leaned his spear against the stone and looked at his reflection in the black water. The face that looked back was thinner than the one he remembered from the first day under the mountain. The eyes were the same.
"We build an ear," he told the water. "Then a tongue. Then a hand."
He did not say sword. Swords came later, or never, if the hand learned to close doors gently.
The bond throbbed once. He felt a second answer that wasn't his ward. The Interface had learned his cadence. It answered with a faint echo that meant ready.
"Tomorrow," he said, and turned away.
Night in Rootwater was never dark. Glowshrooms breathed slow light. Fungal lanterns on sleeping ledges pulsed in time with the Spore Ward. Now, faintly, another rhythm layered beneath them. The first quiet beat of a machine that had never wanted to be a machine, a conduit that had agreed to be a bridge only if the feet on it learned to walk softly.
Cass lay down on stone that remembered how to be a bed. He closed his eyes. The mountain did not sing his mother's lullaby. It counted. He slept between beats.
[System]
Veinworks Project – Phase I Complete
Stability: 63%
Filter Module: Missing
New Sub-Quest: Pattern-Breaker
Objective: Design and craft a resonance filter to block infection signatures without severing clean signal.
Requirements: Glassbone Filament (0/120), Echo Ore Dust (0/50), Cartographer's Sigil Map (Rarity: Rare)
Reward: Controlled Surface Link (One-Way), Bastion Expansion Tier II
Warning: External scanners may notice anomalous quiet in infection flow near Propervy region. Global curiosity risk rising.