It didn’t take long.

Lucius moved like someone who’d walked those paths too many times, avoiding the worst rubble, cutting through gaps in half-fallen walls, stepping over root-thick vines without slowing. Ludger followed at a measured pace, Seismic Sense rolled out ahead of him like an invisible hand feeling for traps, hollows, and anything that didn’t belong. Luna ghosted along the flank, never quite in front, never quite behind.

The deeper they went into the southern side, the more the city changed.

Not in architecture, ruins were ruins, but in color.

At first it was subtle. A faint purple bloom clinging to a crack in stone. A patch of moss that carried a blue sheen when the light hit it right. Then it escalated fast, like someone had spilled paint on a world that had forgotten how to be alive.

Flowers in reds too deep to be natural. Ferns with silver veins that pulsed faintly when Ludger’s mana brushed past. Tall grass that shimmered green-gold at the tips as if it was storing sunlight like coin. The air smelled sharper here too, mint, metal, and something faintly sweet underneath, like rot trying to hide under perfume.

Lucius stopped beside what used to be a street corner, now swallowed by growth. “Here,” he said, quiet. “This is what I meant.”

Ludger’s eyes swept the area once, then narrowed.

“So you weren’t exaggerating,” he muttered.

Lucius gave him a tired look. “I don’t have the energy to exaggerate.”

Ludger ignored the jab and knelt, pressing his palm into the soil. The earth here was darker, almost black, and softer than it should have been, like it had been cultivated. His Seismic Sense dipped down, threading through layers.

The ground answered. It wasn’t just different. It was tampered with.

Something had been mixed into it, fine grit and powder that didn’t match the local stone, and underneath that… traces of old structure. Compact patterns that felt too deliberate, too repeating. Not natural sediment. Not a simple deposit.

A foundation. Or a dumping field.

Lucius hovered nearby, watching his face like it might give him permission to breathe. After a few seconds, he cleared his throat.

“Is there anything else you want to ask?” he said, careful.

Ludger didn’t look up. “No.”

Lucius blinked. “No?”

“You already answered the useful part,” Ludger said, still feeling the soil. “You found a weird patch. You didn’t understand it. You didn’t die. Good work.”

Lucius’ jaw tightened.

Ludger finally lifted his head, eyes flat. “You can continue looking for your convenient rune among the ruins.”

The words were calm, even polite, and somehow still managed to land like a slap.

Lucius stared at him for a heartbeat, then let out a slow, controlled sigh, long enough to bleed off irritation without letting it turn into a scene.

“Yes,” he said, voice strained with forced restraint. “Thank you. Very kind of you.”

Ludger went back to the soil as if Lucius hadn’t spoken at all. Luna’s gaze flicked to Lucius for a fraction of a second. No sympathy. No mockery.

Just a silent reminder: This is who he is. Deal with it.

Lucius swallowed whatever he wanted to say, then turned his eyes toward the broken buildings beyond the colorful growth, ruins that waited like old teeth.

He started walking again, slower this time, like someone trying not to get angry at the wrong person. Behind him, Ludger’s fingers sank into the dark earth, and his expression sharpened as the ground whispered back.

There was something under here. Something buried on purpose.

Ludger spent the next few minutes doing the thing everyone assumed he did by instinct.

He checked. He ran his hand through the soil, pinched it, rolled it between his fingers. Looked for grit that didn’t belong. For powder residue. For the kind of mixed texture that came from dumped waste or ground-up stone. He even cracked a shallow line with earth magic and peeled the top layer back like a page.

Nothing.

No obvious slag. No hidden rune dust. No unnatural compaction. No metallic taste in the dirt.

It was… normal. Annoyingly normal.

The only thing it had, like the whole city, like the forest, like the air itself, was mana. Dense mana. Thick enough that it made the world feel slightly heavier, as if every breath had to push through something invisible.

Ludger sat back on his heels, eyes narrowing. Was that it? Just ambient mana density making plants mutate and thrive?

Maybe. But if it were that simple, the entire region would be a garden. The north wouldn’t look like a graveyard wrapped in vines. The difference wouldn’t be so sharply localized.

He clicked his tongue and tried again, this time with the thing that didn’t care about surface tricks.

Seismic Sense.

He let it extend down through the earth in a broad, careful fan. Not a violent pulse. A controlled probe, like fingers spreading through soil. He mapped layers, topsoil, broken stone, old foundations, root webs, pockets where water pooled.

A minute passed. Then his focus snapped. Because something underneath wasn’t behaving like normal earth.

He felt it, an open space, wide and smooth in a way that didn’t match collapsed basements or natural caverns. Too rounded. Too continuous.

And wet. An underground lake.

Not a small one, either. Large enough that his sense slid across its surface for a long moment before it reached the other side. Ludger’s expression tightened.

Mana gathered there in a way it didn’t gather elsewhere. Not just “a lot.” This was different, condensed, layered, like the water had been steeping in it for centuries. The intensity down there was so high it made the surrounding stone feel thin, like a membrane.

His fingers curled unconsciously, as if he could grab that pressure and squeeze it.

That would explain the plants.

Not because the soil was special… but because something beneath it was leaking life into the ground.

Ludger slowly stood, brushing dirt from his palm.

Luna’s gaze shifted to him immediately, reading the change in his posture.

“What?” she asked softly.

Ludger didn’t answer right away. He stared at the patch of colorful growth like it had personally offended him.

Then he spoke, voice low.

“Found the symptom,” he said.

His eyes flicked south, toward where the ground felt thinnest.

“The cause is underneath.”

He paused, and for the first time since they’d crossed over, his tone carried something close to interest.

“There’s a lake down there,” he said. “And the mana density… is obscene.”

Ludger didn’t waste time announcing what he was about to do.

He simply placed both palms on the ground and pushed.

Earth answered like it had been waiting to be told what shape to become.

The soil in front of him trembled, then parted, not collapsing, not crumbling, but peeling away in clean, controlled layers as if the world itself had been cut with a blade. A circular shaft opened, wide enough for two people to walk side by side if they didn’t mind being uncomfortably close.

Then Ludger shaped the sides.

Stone shifted, flowed, and locked into place as steps, broad and stable, carved with blunt practicality. He didn’t build them all at once. He built them as he went, each new step forming under his feet a heartbeat before he needed it, like the earth was laying down a staircase in real time.

From above, it looked like a mouth opening into the ground.

At first, there was only darkness inside.

A deep, swallowing black that ate sound and made the air feel colder around the rim. Viola leaned forward, peering down with a frown.

“You’re just going to—”

Ludger stepped into the hole without answering.

His silhouette dropped, and the darkness took him.

For a few seconds the shaft stayed black. Only the faint scrape of boots on stone came up, dampened by the depth.

Then something changed.

A soft glow bloomed far below, faint at first, like moonlight filtered through water, then stronger. The light caught the edges of the staircase and painted it in pale blues and greens.

Viola’s eyes widened slightly. Lucius’ breath hitched. Even Luna leaned in, her expression tightening in that way it did when she found something worth remembering.

Ludger’s voice drifted up, calm and unbothered. “Come.”

Viola huffed under her breath like she had opinions about being ordered around, but she moved first anyway. Luna followed without a sound. Lucius hesitated a beat, then stepped in after them, because once you’d crossed a labyrinth wall into a ruined megacity, you didn’t get to pretend caution made you safe.

They descended into the earth.

The staircase continued to form as they walked, the walls smoothing into dark stone, cool to the touch. The air grew damp. Not stale. Not rotten. Clean, almost sweet, threaded with that same mint-and-metal scent from above, only stronger down here, like they were approaching the source instead of sniffing the leftovers.

The glow intensified.

And then the shaft opened. They stepped out into a cavern so wide it swallowed perspective.

An underground lake stretched across the space like a mirror laid over the world’s bones. The water wasn’t black. It wasn’t murky. It shimmered with a faint inner light, as if the mana inside it couldn’t stop glowing. Colors moved just beneath the surface, slow swirls of blue, green, and violet, like ink in clear water, only alive.

The lake’s edge was lined with stone shelves and natural terraces, and every surface was covered in growth that shouldn’t exist underground.

Moss in luminous sheets, soft as velvet, glowing faintly along the contours of rock. Clusters of tiny flowers that opened and closed with the pulse of mana like breathing. Long, translucent vines draped from the cavern ceiling, their tips dripping slow beads of water that caught the light and fell like scattered jewels.

And along the far side, half-buried in stone, there were old ruin fragments, pillars and broken walls that didn’t match the cavern, shaped too cleanly, too deliberately. Nature had wrapped them in color and made them look almost gentle, like it was trying to hide what they used to be.

Ludger stood at the shore, still as a statue, staring at the lake like it had answered a question he hadn’t asked out loud.

Viola’s voice came out quieter than usual. “…Okay.”

Lucius stepped up beside her, eyes reflecting the glow. For a moment, he didn’t look like a noble or a missing problem.

He just looked like someone who’d found something beautiful and didn’t know whether to trust it.

Luna scanned the cavern edges, already searching for threats.

But even she paused for a heartbeat, gaze flicking across the shining water, the soft glowing plants, the unnatural calm. It was pretty. Too pretty. Ludger didn’t blink.

“Now,” he said softly, almost to himself, “this is where the problem is hiding.”

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