"What kind of house did you have us buy?" Runar stared down as he stepped away from the doorway he just created in the wall, turning over to Yamada. He quickly signed to her, "We'll be heading down, prepare your weapons just in case."

  "You got any clue what's down there?" though he still looked down into the hole, Ryan slightly glanced behind him for a moment to look at his uncle, who was shaking his head.

  "How would I?" he replied, stepping over to a nearby carpet. He moved the old table and the remains of the soaked and mouldy couch away with absolute ease, picked up the carpet, and cleaned out the dust and dirt with a single quick flick. A cloud of dust was left behind as Runar spit the parts that got into his mouth back out. He then squatted down and wrote onto the old carpet with his pen.

  "What are you doing?" Ryan asked, taking a curious look, and Runar replied as if it were obvious.

  "I'm making us a way to get down there."

  Runar rolled up the carpet and started carrying it over to the pit. He pushed the rolled-up carpet inside, and then let it open up again. Instead of falling down into the hole, the carpet was laying there as if on solid ground. And then, like it was the most normal thing in the world, Runar stepped onto the carpet, tapping his foot as he waited for Ryan and Yamada.

  As all three of them were on the carpet, the carpet slowly started moving down like an elevator. It felt a bit unnerving, since there was no sort of safety to this thing, and it was getting darker and darker as the carpet moved away from the opening.

  "Ah, Ryan, look at me for a second. I'll help you see in the dark."

  For a moment, Ryan started wondering if Runar could read minds, as he looked over at him. He was startled for a moment as Runar began to write into the air, and a soft glow of magic suddenly appeared in front of him.

  His eyes were filled with a cold air, as if he was staring right into a breeze. Ryan pressed his eyes shut instinctively, and as he slowly opened them with a few blinks, the space in front of him was brightly illuminated. Not like it was when direct sunlight shone through, but as if the sun was blocked by thin blinds.

  Runar stashed his pen away again, "Since you can't see in the dark, you're going to need this. Oh, but... Try not to use your phone right now, or it's going to hurt."

  "Right..." Ryan nodded, just pushing his phone deeper into his pocket, "Wait, so you two can see in the dark?"

  "Mhm. My perception stat is high enough to see through darkness like this if I need to. And Demons just have natural darksight."

  "How high does my perception need to get for that? If I ever unlock it, obviously.

  Runar seemed to think about it for a moment, "Well, I stopped needing extra lights when it reached around 6 or 7. But even with just 3 or 4 you'll be fine in most circumstances. This is just particularly bad."

  "Do I even want to know when you reached '6 or 7'?"

  "I was just a couple years older than you, don't worry."

  "Right," Ryan sighed inwardly. Be didn't even want to know how ridiculous Runar's stats were now. At a certain point as you levelled up, it was easier to boost your stats and they just grew way faster, like some kind of reward for levelling up so much.

  As the conversation slowed and quieted down, Ryan started focusing on the walls. At this point, they were just solid rock. It really felt like someone had taken a perfect chunk out of the ground. There were even old stones in the wall that were quite literally just cleanly cut in half.

  Ryan slowly touched the wall. It was perfectly smooth, "This wasn't dug out by hand."

  "I agree," Runar nodded, "This was done by magic. Cast by a very powerful mage. The traces that I can see here show that this entire tunnel, at least so far, was dug by a single person with only one use of a spell."

  Ryan looked up, seeing the light of the house a fair distance above him. The carpet was moving down fairly fast, so they had crossed quite the distance already. Why was there so much stuff hidden under the city? And this wasn't even in the main part of New Riverside. Most old ruins and hidden areas were apparently where Old Riverside used to be, so right under Oldtown. The Falls, where a ton of mines used to be, also had some secret spaces according to the few tidbits that Runar had dropped here and there.

  But here in Eastbanks? Why was there something here, so deep under an old farmhouse?

  Soon, the wall in front of Ryan simply gave way, as the tunnel led into a cave. It was huge, maybe even larger than the hidden village under Café Runic. But this place was clearly never a dwelling. There were structures here; cobbled floors and pillars and cauldrons, but this wasn't a place people lived. Ryan was able to recognize the type of place this was very quickly, as they had just spoken about it in his Spiritology class. Since spirits and deities were extremely closely connected, it was natural that religion was something discussed in there. One of the pictures that was shown during the class was an old temple from the time of Old Riverside. This was exactly that.

  But why was there a temple down here? Goria's dwelling place made sense, since it was a massive, protected body of water that was turned into a temple, but this was different. There were just stairs and some kind of shrine in front of the cave's wall. But as Ryan turned to his uncle, who was staring forward in stunned disbelief, he realized that there was something else going on here.

  He looked back at the cave wall. At the grooves. At the holes. This artificial night vision wasn't perfect, so he didn't realize it at first. But this wasn't just a wall. It was a skull. A massive skull the size of the house built above it.

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  "What the fu- Dude, what is this?"

  The carpet came to a halt on the ground. This central part of the room was surrounded by pillars, almost like some kind of stone pavilion.

  Runar slowly stepped forward, still staring at the skull with a mixture of awe and confusion on his face, "I'll tell you what this is. It's a titan's skull. I knew that there were some religious sects that worship titans, but... I didn't know about this," he quickly turned over to Yamada, who seemed similarly stunned by what she was seeing. After getting her attention, he quickly signed, "Once we're back outside, contact some of our theologists and archaeologists to give this a one-over. I want to make sure that we're not disturbing anything here."

  "Wait, wait," Ryan stepped in, "What are you talking about? First of all, titans? You mentioned them before, but they're also actually a thing? And the skull of one of them is here?"

  Runar sighed, slowly nodding as he tried to figure out the best way to explain things to his nephew, "Titans are very much a thing, yes. But they're not really a 'species'. They're like forces of nature that simply came alive, similar to spirits in some way. There was a titan that was born from a hurricane. Another that was born from a volcano. Some of them just woke up from the ground one day, millennia ago. But, different to spirits, they're not a magical representation of those things; their bodies physically are those things, so I guess they're more like Elementals in that sense?" thinking deeply, Runar sighed, "But they existed long, long before the system came to be, so they're specifically not elementals. They're primordial beings of nature. Gods that walk the earth. They spend most of their time sleeping, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Whenever one does wake up, it tends to cause a few issues here and there. Luckily there's only a couple dozen in the whole world."

  Ryan slowly turned his head toward the skull in front of him, "... And those kinds of things can die?"

  "Obviously. Anything can die, even gods," Runar started, scoffing, "Speaking of, if you ever hear anyone talk about the 'Church of the Dead God', get out of there as fast as you can."

  "... Huh, alright. So... are you going to excavate this body? Give it a proper burial or something?"

  "Oh, no, no, definitely not."

  Ryan raised a brow, "But it's a dead body. Doesn't this titan deserve to be laid to rest somehow?"

  "It is being laid to rest like this, though," as if it were obvious, Runar stepped forward, "Titans aren't followers of the gods. Hell, most of them are older than a lot of the gods we know today. They're children of the world itself. They want to return to the cycle after death, and part of that cycle is that their bodies are reused in some way. Its 'flesh', if you can really call it that, will have definitely aided in the amount of magical variety in this area. Titans' corpses become an absolutely wonderful place for numerous creatures to survive off of, as with other large living beings. Whales, dragons... this here in particular would be called a Titanfall."

  "Okay... so... then what? Are we just keeping this here?"

  "No, no, not just. As it turns out, this place is actually a lot more special than I thought. Come on, follow me," Runar said, smiling lightly as he walked up the stairs toward the skull. It was fused into the rock around it. Or, no, maybe it was more accurate to say that the skull itself was made of rock, rather than bone, from the very beginning.

  "Are you sure this wasn't just carved out by someone? Like some sort of art thing?"

  Runar nodded, "Oh, yeah, there's no doubt. This is the real deal."

  The rune mage quickly stepped up to the wall beyond the alter. It was right between the teeth of the lower jaw pushing out from the rock below, and the teeth of the upper jaw that were on full display. This was incomprehensively huge. Even that rampaging, oversized Giant Berserker from the Channel would feel tiny compared to whatever this used to be, "So there's dozens of things this big around?"

  "Hm? Oh, no, this is actually a fairly small one. It's not uncommon for the corpse of a dead titan to become a whole mountain range over time."

  Ryan stopped walking as he heard that, trying to figure out if his uncle was trying to make a joke. There was no way that was the case, right? How could something that huge be kept a secret? Unless... "When was the last time one of them woke up?"

  "Around... two hundred years ago? Did you hear about the Great Centurean earthquake? That's what caused it," as he explained this, Runar started pushing against the rock in front of him. It was giving way; this was some kind of slab that was moved into the mouth of the titan's skull. This was probably done by the same earth mage that had dug out that massive hole so cleanly.

  Runar pushed away the rock with just a bit of strain, opening up a doorway that led further inside - into the skull. As the first slit of light poured through, Ryan felt like he was staring right at the sun. His eyes hurt immensely, but he quickly felt Yamada's hands pushing onto them from behind, protecting him from the light.

  "Sorry. Just a second."

  Ryan could only hear Runar's footsteps approach before the cold chill that was coursing through his eyes until now disappeared again. It wasn't any less uncomfortable than the first time around, but it was better than going blind. But when Ryan was finally able to open his eyes again properly, what he was seeing was just a dull, soft light. Barely anything at all. Though, as Runar continued pushing away the rock, that light grew brighter, even if barely so.

  The inside of the skull revealed itself. It was plants, growing deep here underground. Many of them, whether it was the flowers or the insects feeding off them, were giving off a soft bioluminescent glow that, as it came together, was enough to light up this area.

  There was a small, deeply overgrown path in front of them, though the only trace left was the moss-covered cobbled stone. If the state of the house above was anything to go off of, this place had been abandoned for at least four or five years.

  Runar took the lead, making the plants give was with some runes that disappeared too fast for Ryan to even try to read them. As they got to the end of the path, the only thing they really found was a small stone circle.

  "Hm... You can count yourself lucky," Runar said with a smile on his face as he turned toward his nephew, "Looks like you got your hands on a sanctum."

  "A what?"

  Runar kept glancing around, "A sanctum. A 'holy place'. Though, it really just refers to places that act as a sort of intersection between different magical leylines. Titans seek out places like this as their lives come to an end, but this one got particularly lucky. I've never personally seen one with as much magic flowing through as this place. You should feel it, right? The amount of magic in the air?"

  Now that he mentioned it, Ryan did feel a little lightheaded, but he figured that it was just because of being blinded so suddenly and getting the magic pulled out of his eyes. After taking a few deep breaths, it was more than clear that this place had way more magic than even the abandoned amusement park.

  "Won't this-"

  "No, no, sanctums are special, they don't turn into dungeons. They're totally, absolutely safe in that regard. But they have other benefits. A magic user with access to a sanctum grows faster than anyone else. The spirits should also feel comfortable down here," Runar explained, glancing around, "It looks like this place is a specifically cultivated garden of some sort. You should have Gaia turn this into one of her own gardens. If I recall correctly, she should be able to connect to multiple places at some point, so since this isn't that big, have her connect to this one down here and grow the more unique plants you can get down here, and then use the gardens above for larger spaces."

  "Wait, wait, hold on. Are you saying that you're just letting us live here still?"

  Runar raised his brow, "Your name's on the deed, isn't it?"

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