Upon waking, I didn’t immediately recognize my surroundings until I remembered discovering the spinning alcove. A faint light leaked from seams behind, coming from the temple’s entrance. Aside from this soft illumination, darkness engulfed the space.

  Mineral Communion had ended, though I could not know how long ago it had been because the clock in my interface showed no digits. What could have disabled my interface? The spell had performed its duty in time, although its daily cooldown prevented me from casting it again.

  An acidic odor swept my nose, but my eyes had already adjusted to the darkness. What made that smell? And what caused me to pass out?

  Drinking from my waterskin hopefully staved off lightheadedness. How long had I been out? I wasn’t hungry, so it seemed only a matter of minutes.

  A narrow stairway beckoned me downward. It might lead to an empty basement, but this was The Book of Dungeons, so I assumed danger awaited. But assailing a dungeon in a game as realistic as this might not be as simple as other RPGs. Traditionally, dungeons offered content for groups, although many exceptions defied the rule. If Crimson sought to pit players against one another in a battle royale, its dungeons should be suitable for soloists.

  But dungeons had different difficulty levels, giving me plenty of reasons to be fearful. A steep set of stairs spanned the narrow passage, telegraphing dangers ahead. An unfamiliar basement unsettled me but not enough to send me fleeing.

  Should I fetch Fabulosa and Charitybelle? Reaching for my belt, I felt for my short sword. Although I’d taken the cudgel from Tardee days before, I needed more room to use it. The sword calmed my nerves. I decided to proceed.

  Retrieving friends brokered a lose-lose deal. If this passage ended only in an empty basement, I’d look like a coward. If it were a legitimate dungeon, I’d have to share the loot, which didn’t appeal to me either. The uniqueness of the situation warranted investigation.

  But soloing required preparation. I loosened my belt, tossed the magic rope in the air, climbed into the null space of the Dark Room, and retrieved a couple of glowing rocks. Penetrating the gloom with light made exploration possible.

  I climbed back down the Dark Room line, unhooked it, and wrapped it around my waist. I fashioned knots around the glow stone using the extra rope to secure it at my waist. The knots blocked most of the glow stone’s light, so I held the other in my hand. If I dropped it, I could still see. It wasn’t a lot of light, but my eyes had adjusted to the subterranean conditions.

  Holding a short sword in one hand and a glow stone in the other, I peered down the narrow stairs. They dropped only ten feet before a narrow passage disappeared around a corner. Part of me wanted to retreat, but I’d beaten dungeons in dozens of games.

  I tried to rationalize how an acidic odor might fill the air, but nothing came to me.

  It seemed dangerous to stir this silence, but I crept down the stairs slowly, as one would wade into the pool to avoid rippling the surface. I controlled my breathing, hoping the exercise would slow my heartbeat and calm me. I spammed Detect Magic at every opportunity.

  Around the corner, the narrow hallway disappeared into another steep set of stairs. The dimensions made me think I could only be inside the temple walls. Ignoring all the lessons I’d learned from horror movies, I descended them with my short sword readied. The passage intersected with a wide corridor.

  The hallway to the left opened to a room dominated by a dinner table. Cabinets, shelves, and four high-backed chairs surrounded it. To the right, hundreds of golf ball-sized rocks blanketed the passage that ended at a door opening into what looked like a small room. Someone had left the door ajar, but I couldn’t see much beyond it because glow stones didn’t cast much light. Among the little rocks lay bits of wood and remnants of two chairs matching those tucked under the table at the other end of the hall. Detect Magic revealed no glows.

  The scene made no sense. Why had someone moved the chairs out in the hallway—and why were they broken? Their seats weren’t tall enough to let someone standing on them reach the ceiling.

  Searching for an answer, I gazed beyond the wrecked furniture and rocks. Everything about this appeared fishy, so I proceeded with caution.

  I investigated the pebbles before approaching the spooky room. The tiles beneath the rock pellets and chairs were a different color from the rest of the floor and continued down the corridor to the open door.

  Unless the temple’s contractor had run out of tiles during construction, they probably acted as pressure plates. If my Mineral Empathy or Mineral Communion spells were available, they’d probably confirm the presence of traps.

  Golf ball-sized holes riddled the walls on either side of the discolored tiles. Their size matched the size of the pebbles. The rocks scattered across the floor served as the trap’s spent ammunition.

  Pieces of bones rested amid the pellets. The fragments looked human, but it looked as if only one person fell victim to the trap. I spotted no skulls in the rubble, so my guess might be off.

  Nothing in the area glowed from my Detect Magic cantrip, so it must be a mechanical trap. Finding it wasn’t altogether bad for a dungeon crawl. If it still worked, then it guarded my back. I could safely explore one end of the hall without something attacking from behind.

  I turned toward the room with the table, leaving the partially opened doorway, the pellets, and broken bones undisturbed.

  Ambient light spilled from lightwells along a wall. Tints of color filled their luminance, and I surmised it emanated from the stained glass windows of the temple’s public chamber above. Long ago, someone had directed the prismatic rays into these eerie depths to make this living space more comfortable, but now the place lay in ruin.

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  The lightwells illuminated the place enough to reveal the debris around the table. Desiccated food and empty containers cluttered the surface. Tattered wall hangings had decayed and fallen to the floor. A decrepit bed slumped against the wall. Blankets crumbled to dust when I touched them. I kept an eye open for anything that might be of comfort for living in the wilderness, but nothing here held value.

  The girls would scrunch their noses if I presented these moldy pillows as gifts, which made me grin. I considered doing it as a goof, but touching these filthy things might not be the wisest prank.

  The dining room connected to a lounge filled with rotting furniture. At one end of the lounge, a knee-high platform bearing a metal plate stood. The plate had an etched inscription—Big Barry, killed on the Eve of the First Festival.

  Who was Big Barry? He sounded like a dungeon boss, but the metal plate looked like the inscription of a trophy. Big Barry sounded like the name of a taxidermied animal or monster. It must have been valuable because someone had taken it.

  More lightwells bathed the area with colorful rays, but the hallway beyond did not have such a light source. A deep gloom smothered the area in shadow. My glow stones felt like lifelines as I approached the passage.

  The short hallway led to a chamber filled with rotted wood. The only identifiable features were shelving frames secured to the floor, but their six-foot depth looked odd. Who made shelves that deep? Was this once a morgue? That answer made little sense, especially given the proximity to living quarters. I found nothing but a few empty crates and barrels.

  The acidic smell increased through the doors beyond the shelving room. I picked up my pace, hoping that prolonged exposure to this miasma would not incur a debuff.

  The carcass of a giant boar lying on the floor captured my attention.

  “Hello, Big Barry. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m glad you’re something less than a dungeon boss.”

  The animal must have weighed 400 pounds when alive, but the hollow husk shook easily, like a papier-maché sculpture. Its torn and battered hide looked like someone had tried to destroy the thing for whatever reason—and succeeded. Two glassy eyes gazed sightlessly in the dark. I poked the stuffed boar with my sword, but nothing inside moved or rattled.

  Nothing reacted after casting Detect Magic. It was just my luck—not only had I discovered my first dungeon in The Book of Dungeons, but someone or something had already emptied it.

  A storeroom filled with work benches and rusting hand presses connected to the boar lounge through a short hallway.

  Identifying this place as a winery explained the deep shelving in the previous room. It had stored kegs, not bodies. Shards of crates, moldy sacks, and debris littered every corner. Pegs lined the walls, from which rotten rags hung. Tools had brittled with age and rust. Odds and ends filled the shallow shelves, but I kicked over nothing informative or valuable. Every scrape and bump I made echoed like an alarm in this Stygian stillness, but no spirits or ghosts investigated the noises I made.

  Hadn’t the pontifex been a winemaker? He once ran this temple, so Mother Marteen’s story checked out—this must have been his secret workshop.

  An open doorway led to a winding metal stairway, and the atmosphere grew pungent and chilly. Oddly enough, it didn’t smell like rot or death. The odor seemed alchemical.

  I descended the staircase as it spiraled around a gigantic copper barrel suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains. The metal platform echoed beneath my feet, but it felt sturdy. The barrel had aged with a verdant patina, and a browned viscous substance covered the floor beneath it. Judging by the dried splashes along the wall, it once had been a thinner liquid and had solidified over time. The smell of vinegar overpowered me. The aroma permeating the dungeon came from this subbasement, a fragrance so intense it set my lungs on fire.

  Someone had smashed the bottom of the hanging copper barrel, causing it to flood the room with its contents. Stepping into the sticky brown goo, I moved past the looming barrel and entered the main chamber. Squishy sounds accompanied my footfalls, and the traction felt safe—neither sticky nor slippery. The walls featured faded plaster frames. Abstract buttressing, pillars, and arches supported the barrel-vaulted, 30-foot ceiling. As I carried the glow stone, the hollow spaces in the ceiling danced with shadows.

  I cast Detect Stealth, but nothing glowed.

  Broken pieces of white stone rested at the bottom of the stairs, contrasting with the dark brown vinegar sludge. Was that chalk or limestone? I picked up a piece. Part of it felt smooth, like the remains of a statue. I could see bits of sculpted arms and hands whose fingers ended in white claws. I spotted the busted head of a horned gargoyle. It looked heavy but possessed no item description.

  I scanned the subbasement for doors and found none—a big room but a dead end. Someone had already plundered this place. Between the triggered trap and the defeated gargoyle, I’d been too slow in playing the contest, yet none of the gang had mentioned clearing a dungeon. And I knew everyone well enough to know none of them would keep a secret like this from the rest of us.

  Behind me, several feet above the floor by the stairwell, I spied a plinth that looked like the pedestals used around the garden and temple. The plinth held no statue. Perhaps someone stored it here in case they needed to replace one on the temple grounds, but it might have once held a gargoyle.

  I switched from my short sword to my cudgel and tightened my grip. If more gargoyles appeared, a bludgeoning weapon would come in handy.

  Stacks of minor healing potions served as my only source of heals, so perhaps soloing a dungeon had been foolish. I had a total health pool of 120 when buffed with Heavenly Favor. Potions alleviated 50 points of wounds and exhaustion, but I could only drink one every ten minutes. When I’ve earned another power point, I should probably purchase a healing spell like Rejuvenate.

  Winery equipment filled the 100-foot-long room. I passed rows of empty bottles, copper funnels, barrels, vats, wrenches, pliers, hammers, cork machines, and presses.

  Detect Magic finally revealed a glow on the far side of the room. The glowing object resided in a nook, precisely like the spinning alcove at the dungeon’s beginning. Instead of framing an illusionary statue, it housed a clocklike device filled with copper gears, springs, and exotic mechanisms.

  I poked it to ensure its realness and that it wasn’t an illusion like the pontifex statue. No rust covered its intricate inner workings. Someone had bolted the instrument into the alcove, so I couldn’t remove it. Drawing out additional glow stones raised the lighting conditions enough to study its inner machinations.

  If Charitybelle were here, she could figure out its functionality. She insisted on showing me designs of water-powered mills so its gears weren’t a complete mystery. Its gears focused on regulating their motion, like a clock, except the instrument had no face, markings, or readings. No hands or tumblers could tell operators how much time had passed.

  This gadget probably measured something invisible, like air pressure, humidity, or the lingering vinegar odor. Perhaps it facilitated the fermentation process in wine-making.

  Its outer encasement didn’t have open holes, so it wasn’t missing a component.

  A crank tempted me to turn the springs, but its tightened coils hinted that someone had already wound it. Then I spied a little switch. The connected mechanizations resembled a car’s transmission that reversed the direction of spinning wheels, but I wasn’t mechanically inclined enough to decipher their purpose. Without gauges or exterior outputs, it seemed to do nothing.

  Flicking the switch set parts of the device into motion, making tinny, clicking sounds. While I listened, a wave of dizziness struck, causing me to collapse against the wall and slip into unconsciousness.