There was something a bit grisly about actively looting people that had been dead just a short while ago. Alex didn’t ignore that fact — but it wasn’t like not looting them would bring anyone back. What was done was done, and they hadn’t just sat around waiting while everyone had gotten killed.

They’d done their best to help. That was all that could be done. Leaving anything behind now would have just been pointless. And so Alex and Claire had gathered just about everything worth taking from the bodies covering the blood-soaked moss hills.

Their efforts also came with a disturbing discovery. The Ancestry was absorbing the corpses scattered across it, along with anything that happened to remain upon them. Many times, they reached a limb only to find that the rest of it had been swallowed by the earth. Weapons, clothes, bodies, blood, the same. The Ancestry consumed all of them.

It must have been using the bodies to keep powering itself — and to clean the room up so it could be prepared for the next set of people that stumbled into it. There was something to be said for recycling. Alex appreciated that a fair bit less when the things being recycled were valuables that he had his eyes on.

By the time five minutes had passed, not a single body remained in the room. The blood was gone, and all that remained was the pattering rain and rolling green hills. But that wasn’t to say Alex and Claire’s efforts were without reward.

They received quite a number of Spatial Rings — including a stabilized one which Claire donned herself — and another 53 Credits in total. That brought their Credit rewards from this room alone all the way up to 253, an incredibly respectable number.

Alex and Claire also amassed a number of weapons from the dead. The majority of them ended up getting tossed into one of the Spatial Rings and stored. Claire no longer had any need for them, but Alex claimed a rather plain looking glaive for himself.

Having a long weapon to use Glint’s magic through felt like it would be smart, and it would help make him seem a bit less like, well, himself to anyone who might have recognized him.

The only minor issue was that Alex didn’t exactly have training with anything like a glaive. Claire had only shown him how to use a sword, but he was pretty sure that the important bit was sticking the pointy part into the thing he didn’t like. The rest could be figured out on the road.

In addition to the Credits and weapons, the two of them had also found a number of potions amongst the dead. The majority of them were stored in identical glass vials with matching stoppers. They housed liquids of every color from clear to brown to rainbow and everything in between — and not a single one of them had been labeled.

That made it somewhat difficult to tell what the potions did, but Alex stored them in his Stabilized Spatial Ring anyway. Someone would know how to figure out what they did. And, if worst came to worst, he could always sell them to someone.

“They weren’t too well outfitted,” Claire observed as they finished putting away the rest of the items they’d claimed. “Looks like Hazel’s group was probably some lower level branch of one of the families.”

“Something tells me the more powerful ones wouldn’t have gotten decimated so badly by this room either,” Alex said. “But what did you make of her? Didn’t it almost seem like—”

“She’s important enough to matter, but not important enough to truly care about her men. It’s likely they were assigned to her. Maybe against her will,” Claire said. “I’ve seen it before. Nobles who are more useful as tools rather than people. Just up enough the ladder that their family won’t let them run wild on their own. That’s probably why she didn’t care about her own men. They may have been watching her just as much as protecting her.”

Alex shook his head. “All this politics shit seems like a huge pain in the ass.”

“It’s fun,” Claire said. She paused for a moment. “At times. I think Ayrin handled it quite differently than other planets seem to.”

“You think she’s actually going to be able to offer Finley much of anything?”

Claire shrugged in response. “I have no idea. I can’t read people’s minds. She’s got to have some degree of pull if she made it to this Ancestry. Then again, she could have just gotten separated from the person her group was actually meant to be protecting. Who knows. If she lives, we’ll find out.”

“Hey!” Alyssa called before Alex could say anything else. They both turned toward her. She was crouched near the base of a hill, the tip of her huge brush just barely poking into vision in the rain over a sloping path of mossy ground. “Over here! I think I found it!”

Alex and Claire both strode over to Alyssa. The area of the hill she was pointing at looked exactly like every other bit of the room around them. It was completely identical. Alex squinted at it, then looked to the artist.

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“I don’t see anything. Again. But after the door in the wall, I believe you. How is it you’re noticing this stuff?”

“Seriously? You can’t see it?” Alyssa poked at the ground.

Alex and Claire exchanged a glance.

“No,” Claire said. She pulled the scale out from her pocket and held it out to Alyssa. “Nothing at all. But if you can… is there a spot for this?”

“Yeah,” Alyssa said. She stared at Claire and Alex for a second, as if trying to see if they were playing a prank on her. Then she jabbed the scale into the ground like a toddler trying to mash a round peg through a square hole.

The scale vanished.

A bright white line of energy sliced out from where Alyssa’s hand had touched the ground. It darted through the moss, tracing the form of a door into the earth before swinging inward.

Beneath them was a floor made up of dried, old vines interwoven throughout each other like a wicker basket. It was rough and jagged, with sickly black splotches of semi-liquid mass scattered throughout it.

The cloying smell of rot hit Alex at once. His nose scrunched in distaste and he pulled slightly away from the doorway to avoid breathing in any more of the foul air than he had to.

“Well. I’m never questioning your detective abilities again,” he said. “And I guess the Ancestry isn’t too keen on giving us multiple normal-smelling rooms in a row. Whoever the Rotkeeper was, his nose was definitely fried.”

“I don’t see any monsters waiting,” Claire said, peering down through the door. “Makes me wonder what it is that we needed a special key just to get to. I don’t see a clear reward in there. Could be another fight.”

“Maybe we should wait a moment before continuing,” Alyssa suggested. “Just to regenerate some magic.”

“Yeah,” Alex said after a moment. “Probably smart. But we shouldn’t wait too long. This is a race. All the best loot is going to go to the people that complete the most trials and find the cool shit first. Sitting around for too long will put us behind — but rushing ahead like idiots will definitely get us killed.”

“Twenty minutes?” Claire suggested. “That should be enough to recover without sacrificing too much. We should also keep an eye on this room. You never know if something else will show up in it. This isn’t a dungeon, so the rules are different. The System isn’t directly governing anything here.”

Both Alex and Alyssa nodded.

The three of them all sat down around the entrance of the room below. Not one of them let their guard down. Their eyes all scanned the hills for any sign of more skeletons rocking up to join their little gathering, Claire’s warning ringing true in all of their minds.

Minutes passed. Alex’s energy regenerated, and it wasn’t long before he was in proper fighting shape once more. The Ancestry didn’t spring any new surprises on them. Their rest went undisturbed, and it wasn’t long before all three of them were prepared to set out once again.

“I’ll go first,” Alex said, squinting into the rotted room beneath them. He could already feel the trill of adrenaline picking up in him.

“You won’t find any complaints here,” Alyssa said.

“We’ll be right behind you,” Claire said.

Alex just nodded. He readied his newly claimed glaive and approached the hole in the ground. The rotted mass of twisting, dry vines was still spotted and marred with liquid black rot. It didn’t look like the room had changed since they’d first looked into it.

They weren’t going to find anything out from up here. So, without another word, Alex took a step forward and dropped through the hole. His hair whipped up around him for a second as he fell, landing on the dry roots between two patches of rot beneath with a crunch. A tingle pricked against the back of his mind, like uneasy waves lapping against the shore of his thoughts, but there was no time to register it further.

The vile smell intensified a hundredfold. The stench drove into Alex’s gut like a punch. There must have been some kind of magical barrier between the rooms because there had been no hint of just how rancid the air was down here. It was strong enough to make Alex’s eyes water even through his mask. He took a quick step to the side, his gaze sweeping over the room as he readied his glaive — and then he froze.

Someone had beat them to it.

The smell of rot wasn’t just coming from the black pools. There were bodies of what could have only been described as sickly dryads strewn in every direction. The monsters were shriveled and had been carved like someone had tossed the lot of them into a weedwhacker.

But they weren’t alone. Scattered amidst the dryads were humans. Most of them were as rotted and destroyed as the monsters, huge chunks of their flesh melted away and merged with the ground.

Alex’s eyes didn’t linger on the bodies for more than an instant. His gaze was pulled right to the center of the room, where a large man knelt, body impaled and held in place by several jagged, dry roots that pierced clean through him. But the roots weren’t the only things lodged in his body. A massive sword emerged from his stomach, and there were at least a dozen other weapons driven into him at various angles.

Blonde hair hung around his face in a flowing river, the blood splattering his flesh somehow not even so much as staining the inexplicably luscious locks.

Two thumps behind Alex marked Claire and Alyssa landing behind him. Claire gagged, her improved senses working against her almost instantly.

“What is that — whoa,” Alyssa said, her eyes going wide as she stared past Alex’s shoulder. “Damn. Hunk down. That’s unfortunate. He looks like he was—”

The man’s head snapped up. He drew in a sharp breath, his large eyes shifting into focus and locking right onto Claire.

Alyssa screamed, leaping a step back and bringing her brush to bear before her.

“No way,” Claire said, raising a hand to her mouth.

Alex couldn’t even say anything. He couldn’t quite muster the words. A part of him wondered if he was hallucinating, but he didn’t think even the System could have made this up.

Kneeling before them was none other than Derek.

“Claire!” the mostly immortal man exclaimed, a grin stretching across his wide face. “I was just taking a nap. How have you been?”