“Nobody really believes Kyron was interred in the Zenith Crystal, you know,” Renauld said to me as our entire group threaded our way through the outer layer of Blutstein. “It’s common knowledge what it actually is.”

  It hadn’t taken long for us to register the Astray with the port authority of Blutstein. Primarily because as soon as the official we’d spoken to had heard my name, his eyes had lit up and he’d informed me that I was expected. To my surprise, Grey had apparently paid in advance for me to have access to his private docks, where his own ship lay waiting for her captain. The suddenly very respectful official had told me politely that the dockhands would gladly ferry my ship into those docks at no extra cost. I had initially been wary and unwilling to let anyone I didn’t know captain my ship, but Liora had told me it wouldn’t be a problem.

  Nobody was going to try and fleece a direct guest of Headmaster Greycton of the Academy of Mystic Arts. Liora was very confident about that, so I let it go.

  For now.

  Honestly, I initially questioned just how my mentor had known I was going to be coming to Blutstein in my own ship and that I needed a dock for it. That was until I remember just who he was in a very public ‘relationship’ with.

  The moon had probably told him I was on my way.

  Thanks to the very expensive spatially expanded bags we’d picked up in Kawamara for the Goryuen expedition, it wasn’t hard for us to pack up all of our belongings and carry them with us as we left my ship behind. Normally, I would have thought it was a bit sad to carry around nearly everything you owned in a bag the size of a rucksack, but with the proper Enchantment, it was…less so.

  After all, I had well over a thousand pieces of gold within my own, not to mention the weaponry, the raw Oninite ore, all my personal supplies…hell. That wasn’t even counting all of the rewards I’d gotten from Emperor Seimei or the treasures I’d picked up from the Netherim Bunker.

  I was doing fairly well for myself these days.

  Liora led the way through the narrow streets of the lower level as we stepped out of the wharf district, more than familiar with the city as the only native among us. The rest of us followed behind, while I had Aveline up on my shoulders once more, to better let the little girl rubberneck her head around to see as much of her surroundings as possible. Fade followed along closely at my heels, head on a swivel just like the little girl, while Sena had elected to use her own inborn gift to shrink down to the size of a kitten. She was observing the city just as curiously from a perch on Azarus’s broad shoulder, if not with more imperious dignity.

  I didn’t see the draw of Blutstein yet. I kept an eye on the surroundings while I simultaneously listened to Renauld’s yammering about the city, both Azarus and I doing our best to pay attention and not look bored. Venix trailed behind us silently, his hatted head lowered in tense thought as he acted nearly like a bodyguard to us. Fade had to keep close to my heels or else get in the way of other people, if only because of his antlers.

  “The Zenith crystal is a Ward Stone, really,” Renauld continued his explanation. “Probably the strongest one on Vereden. It’s a relic from the age of the gods, something personally enchanted by Kyron himself. Nobody, not even the Headmaster, really understands just how it functions. It’s kinda…both way more advanced, and way more primitive than modern Magic. But we know the effects. It synchronizes with the walls of each of the tiers, casting down layers of overlapping Wards. The result is something…sorta like an onion, I guess? The walls themselves are strengthened too, and because of it, nobody has ever really managed even to scratch them.”

  Down here in the lower layer, it was all residential, and densely packed at that. The streets were barely wide enough for three people to walk through shoulder to shoulder, while the…unique tower architecture of the city meant that most homes were packed in tightly to each other. In all fairness, each ‘house’ looked to have been a custom job, all of them easily standing out from each other and looking well cared for. Greenery wasn’t exactly alien down here, either. The copious amounts of trees planted everywhere made the cramped streets seem even more so.

  And that was the problem for me. I couldn’t stand just how tightly packed it was down here. Just being in these relatively crowded environs was enough to make my neck crawl.

  A major contributing factor was that I could see plenty of evidence of the war in the district. It had been easy to forget just how much the conflict had impacted the people when I had been in far away Hinaga, but now that I was back in Herztal, I couldn’t miss it.

  There was a sizable homeless component out on the streets of the district that actually had homes. They seemed to be out on every street corner and lurking in every alleyway. By and large, they didn’t even seem dangerous to me. I think a good number of them were probably discarded soldiers, but I think the majority were largely refugees who fled from one battle or another, hoping to find succor within the strongest walls on the continent. Problem was, that seemed to have been the idea of most people. This wasn’t a small city by any means, likely either the largest or the second largest by what I knew. But there were just too many in the walls now.

  In the grand scheme of things, a few months after a war wasn’t long enough for things to settle down. I…couldn’t help but notice that a large number of those homeless were Sculpted.

  I did my best to direct Aveline’s gaze away from all of them, even though they had my sympathy.

  Hopefully, I could find something different to buy in a different area when it came time to lay down some roots for Aveline and me. I’d go mad if I had to live in a crowded neighborhood, after all the time spent out in the wilder world I’d done in the last year. I had no doubt crime was also on the rise, just from the sheer press of bodies that had descended on the Human Gem City.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  I was pretty thankful when we reached the end of the lower layer and stepped out into the buffer zone that led up to the middle layer. Arranged all the way around the ring of the wall were what looked to be soldier barracks, still constructed in the usual Blutsteinian manner.

  I couldn’t help but notice that for all of the many barracks towers down here, they looked a little…sparsely occupied.

  More evidence of the war. I’m not sure the ink had even dried on the treaty, and even then. Even then there were likely military tensions because Blutstein didn’t have a King right now. How were you going to enforce a treaty when you didn’t have an official head of state?

  For some reason, the coronation of Oskar was being delayed. That had been on the lips of nearly every person we’d passed on the way through the residential district. Even though the war was over, people still seemed uneasy, crowding together in huddled bunches and whispering to each other. I didn’t blame them, either. It was my understanding that there had been a brief siege on the city some months ago, where the forces of the Uprising had blockaded both the land and sea routes. It had only come to an end when it was discovered that the previous High King, Oskar’s brother Alaric, had committed suicide instead of surrendering.

  And even that was suspicious, in and of itself. I didn’t get the impression that the Blutsteiniens actually believed Alaric had killed himself.

  The common belief was that he had been assassinated.

  Which…I understood. I just didn’t know who could have done it. By that point, the Nocturne Division had pretty much been dismantled and there were very few covert operatives left to the Uprising. Not none, of course. I hadn’t forgotten how the Bluebacks had absorbed the remnant Agents of my former Division.

  I shook off such thoughts when we reached the access point to the middle layer. I had been wondering just what it would be and had dreaded the possibility that it might be stairs. Thankfully, I was wrong.

  It was an enormous lift. Actually, the mechanism of it was…a little familiar to me, to be honest.

  This reminded me of the barge platform I had needed to desperately defend back on Goryuen, in the lead-up to our entrance into the hollow heart of Gorenzan. There was a large stone platform attached to the sheer stone wall of the dividing layer, through no method I could discern. It was like the flat edge of it had simply been glued to the wall. The platform itself was easily big enough to fit nearly a dozen wagons and the beasts pulling them, as well as probably over a hundred different people seeking passage upward. Thankfully it wasn’t that packed, but there were still more than a few different carts of goods on the sheer stone, waiting for some signal from the stone guardhouse nearby. The method by which it was raised and lowered was even familiar to me, considering there were two enormous lengths of chains attached to the sides of the platform, trailing off into the sky. Both were reminiscent of the mechanisms back on Goryuen, which I found curious. I had been told that had been the work of an ancient Kawamaran craftsman, but now I wondered. Considering this entire city had seemingly been constructed by one of the ‘gods’, had the mechanism back on Goryuen been divine in origin as well?

  The bored-looking iron Sculpted guard at the tollhouse before the lift sure wasn’t divine, though. He barely gave us a single disinterested glance before looking back down at the desk he was sitting at and making a mark in a logbook. “Six silver for non-citizen group passage.”

  As the current person in front, Renauld sputtered. “What? Since when is the toll that high?! Last time I was here it was barely five copper per person for passage!”

  Liora piped up from behind him. “Actually, I am a citizen.”

  The Sculpted directed a gaze over to her and raised a hand that held a strange metallic plate. There was a clear inscription of a hand in front of it, as well as a clear piece of quartz at the top. As he shifted it in his hands, I could see an Enchantment Disc attached to the back. “Hand, please.”

  Without protest, Liora stepped forward and laid her furry hand in the center of the circular plate. After a second, the quartz at the top lit up with a faint green light. The Sculpted nodded. “Confirmed. Passage is free for Blutstein citizens engaging in non-merchantile activities. The toll is six silver for the rest of you. Per.” Meanwhile, the still frowning Renauld got a half-lidded metallic stare in return. “Five copper per person was before the treasury was emptied for a war, sir. Just be thankful you’re not merchants. They’re really feeling the higher tax on goods, so…six silver.” Renauld grumbled about it but presented the required payment for all of us. The Sculpted nodded and reached over to pull a lever on the side of his booth down. In response, the long wooden beam that blocked off the path to the lift rose, not unlike an entrance to a car park back on Earth. “The next lift cycle is in ten minutes. Enjoy your stay in the City of Spires. Next!”

  At his direction, we shuffled onto the platform, and I looked around as we did. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the people on here with us didn’t look exactly…poor. Most of them either looked like merchants or the well-to-do. I frowned as I mulled that over.

  Six silver to access the broader markets didn’t seem like much to me initially, but that was until I considered just how…insolated from poverty I’d been since I landed in Vereden. The unified currency system on this planet wasn’t hard to grasp, really. There was copper, silver, and gold, with a hundred pieces of each leading to the next. A large, quality loaf of bread was typically about five to eight copper. A regular family could expect to spend about fifteen to twenty copper to feed a person per day, so about five or six silver a month for a combined nine to twelve silver a month. And that was just food costs, really. There were a bunch of different costs in everyday life, and considering normal craftsmen typically only made about fifteen silver a month…

  Damn, Blutstein was really putting the screws to the underclass. Were the royal coffers really in such dire straits that they had to bleed their laborers and craftsmen dry? There were some businesses in the lower layer, but not to the extent there were up there. Most jobs and supplies were in the above district.

  I was jolted out of my observations when the chains on either side of the platform tightened and began to lift it into the sky. It was a short journey up to the middle layer, and honestly, I could see an immediate difference once we reached it. It was not only much more open up here, but much cleaner as well. The people were much better fed, with far more guards and soldiers evident on the streets, while the cries of merchants trying to hawk their goods from stalls and stores alike filled the air. The noise of commerce and crafting filled the air as Liora and Renauld led us along the ring of the middle layer to where the Academy was supposed to be. We had to hike halfway across the city in order to reach it from the dock face position we entered into Blutstein from, and by the time we reached the campus I was already sick of all the walking. I swear to god I was going to figure how some way to reach the docks quicker than the near five damn hours it took us to reach the middle layer alone. But nooo, I just had to turn down Renauld’s offer of a carriage. I was already envious of all the people I’d seen riding in them along the neat cobbled streets, both here and in the lower layer.

  It took us another two hours of walking to reach the campus, and by that time, Aveline had elected to take a nap. And when we arrived at the gates, I couldn't help but sigh.

  They were shut tight.

  Of course they were.