Strongest Family System

No one had ever brought a flower into this room. None of the group had encountered anything like it blooming anywhere in the valley above.

Robert looked at it for a long moment.

Someone had walked into this archive on bare feet sometime in the last three days, vanished at the base of a hidden formation door, and left behind a fresh flower at the centre of a pattern that had not been activated in three hundred years.

They were not the first people to find this place since the Keepers disappeared.

Someone else had already been here. Recently. And whoever it was had left something behind on purpose.

Amidst the tranquillity of the archive, the six of them stood in silence, their eyes drawn to the tiny white flower resting in the grooves, and the air buzzed with unexpressed feelings. Not a single person reached for the flower.

It sat at the centre of the circular grooves, white and fully open, looking as fresh as if someone had picked it that same morning. Robert crouched beside it and studied the surrounding stone before doing anything else, checking for pressure plates, hidden triggers, or any indication that the flower's placement was connected to some mechanism rather than left there by hand.

He found nothing of that kind. He directed the question inward.

"System, analyse the flower."

Object Classification: Unknown Spiritual Flower.

Estimated Age: Less than 24 Hours.

Weak Spiritual Aura.

Origin: Unknown.

Recommendation: Conserve Carefully.

Less than a day old.

That settled the timing more precisely than the footprints had. Whoever had walked through this sealed archive on bare feet had done so recently enough that the flower they left behind had not yet begun to wilt. This was not an old mystery layered on top of an older one. Someone was actively coming and going from this room, possibly within hours of the group's own arrival.

Robert lifted the flower carefully, keeping his fingers away from the grooves themselves, and set it aside on a flat section of undisturbed floor. The formation did not react. No light, no sound, no shift in the air. Whatever the flower's purpose had been, removing it produced no visible consequence.

Sai moved to the grooves next, crouching low enough to examine the stone at eye level rather than from above.

He ran his fingers along the edge of one curve and stopped. There were scratches along the groove's inner surface, faint but consistent, running in the same direction repeatedly rather than scattered randomly, as natural wear would appear. He checked a second section of the circle and found the same pattern. A third confirmed it.

These were not the marks of erosion or accidental damage. They were the marks of something being dragged or scraped across the same path again and again, over what had to be a considerable span of time for the marks to accumulate this consistently.

It was clear that someone had been taking care of this formation. Not just once, but consistently, and for such a long time that the stone itself was starting to reflect that care.

Eissa was working along the base of the smooth wall when she found the second set of prints.

They were near the wall's right edge, low enough that she had to kneel to see them clearly. Small. Much smaller than the barefoot prints that led to the wall and vanished, closer to a child's foot than an adult's. But when she measured the distance between one print and the next, the spacing did not match the size of the print at all.

The stride length was surprisingly long. It was so extensive that whatever left these prints, despite its small feet, was moving across the ground like something significantly taller.

Nobody in the group had an explanation for that.

Robert looked at the prints for a long moment before asking the system directly in his mind.

"System, identify the footprints."

Species: Unknown.

Threat Assessment: Unknown.

Recommendation: Exercise Caution.

It was not the kind of answer that resolved anything. It only confirmed that whatever had left these tracks was not something the system had prior information about and that its nature and danger level were both entirely unknown. He looked at the prints again, then at the wall they led toward, and set the question aside without further comment. There was nothing more to extract from it yet.

Ronan had moved to the lower section of the smooth wall, examining the stone close to the floor where the grooves met the wall's base.

He found scrape marks there as well, different in character from the ones Sai had identified in the grooves. These were broader and heavier, the kind of marks left by something solid being dragged rather than something being cleaned or maintained with a light touch. The marks ran in a short arc from the floor up to where the smooth wall met the stone, and then simply stopped, disappearing into the seam where the door met its frame.

He called Robert over and pointed it out without saying much. The marks were not old. Not fresh either, but recent enough that they had not been worn smooth by the passage of centuries. This door had not remained sealed and undisturbed for three hundred years. Someone had been opening it, closing it, and moving something through it on a schedule regular enough to leave a physical record behind.

Robert stood at the base of the wall and thought through what that meant.

That settlement had been deserted for three hundred years. The people who once lived there were no longer around. However, the responsibilities they bore did not just fade away with their departure. Someone, in the years that followed, had picked up where the Keepers left off and kept their mission alive.

Someone had kept coming back to this archive, to this formation, to this exact spot, and had kept doing whatever needed to be done to maintain it.

With his arms crossed and leaning against the wall, Sai made it clear: the settlement was no more. But the duty it was meant to serve? That was still very alive. Someone had been upholding the seal for three centuries, long after the original creators had faded away.

The breeze came without warning.

It glided through the archive softly, just for a fleeting moment, but there was no mistaking it. A cool breeze, flowing and alive, in a room that had no windows, no open passage above except for the sealed staircase they had descended, and absolutely no logical source for any air movement whatsoever.

Everyone in the room went still.

The gentle breeze brought with it a delicate scent of the flower that Robert instantly recognised. It was the same pleasant fragrance from the flower he had placed aside just moments ago. Soft and enchanting, it was unlike anything he had ever experienced in the valley above.

He looked toward the smooth wall immediately.

It had not budged an inch. There were no seams that had opened, no parts that had shifted, and the surface looked as if it had not done anything at all. The wind did not blow from the formation door.

He directed the question inward.

"System, what caused the wind?"

Unable to determine. Recommendation: Search for Secondary Air Passage.

The group split up and began searching the archive's walls and ceiling more carefully than before, checking for gaps or openings they might have missed during the initial exploration. It was one of the caravan guards, working near the base of the staircase, who found it.

Concealed behind another section of fallen stone, in the same way the staircase had been, was a narrow shaft that was carved straight down into the rock.

The passage was old, its edges smoothed out by centuries of wear, but it was definitely not blocked. A steady flow of cool air drifted through, rising from somewhere beneath and making its way up the shaft into the archive room above.

Robert crouched at its opening and looked down into it. The shaft continued further than the light from the archive could reach, descending into darkness that gave no indication of how deep it went or what it eventually connected to.

He stood there for a long moment, feeling the steady current of air against his hand.

The archive wasn't just a standalone room. It was linked, via this shaft and probably through other hidden passages yet to be discovered, to something far more extensive lying beneath the settlement. The monument above served as the seal, while the sleek wall in this room acted as the entrance.

Somewhere deep down, far enough that the air filtering up through this narrow shaft had travelled a good way to get to them, something was still functioning.

Three hundred years after the Keepers disappeared, the foundation beneath Forgotten Moon City remained anything but quiet.

It was alive, in whatever way something like that could possibly be.