Ludger finally slowed when he reached the second half of the second section.
By then, he had covered enough ground that the air itself felt different. The buried structure had changed little in style, still broad corridors, still broken pillars and ruined traces of some ancient city, but the pressure of the place had deepened. The silence between fights felt heavier. The monsters, too, had changed.
They were larger here.
Not dramatically so, but enough to matter. Their frames were thicker, their movements more violent, and the old stone bodies seemed denser, as if whatever force had made them had packed more weight into every limb. Some had broader shoulders and heavier armor fused into their bodies. Others wielded weapons that looked less ceremonial and more brutal. A few had moved with enough aggression that a slower delver might have mistaken them for a real threat.
For Ludger, they had not slowed him down. Not really. They hit harder. They lasted a little longer. That was all.
More importantly, he had put a great deal of distance between himself and Elira. If she had any sense, she would have turned around by now and gone back. There was no reason to keep following after that display unless she wanted to become a burden, and while she seemed curious enough to flirt with that possibility, Ludger preferred to assume she wasn’t completely hopeless.
He exhaled once, the remains of Overdrive fading down through his body in measured waves, and looked over the wreckage around him.
Broken stone bodies littered the corridor in chunks. Arms, shattered torsos, crushed heads, fragments of armor, ruined weapons. The aftermath of his passage had turned the old underground street into something closer to a demolished graveyard.
Only then did another thought occur to him. Materials.
He had been so focused on training his Monk skills, on pushing his body and testing his movement against the labyrinth’s resistance, that he had almost forgotten the simplest part of delving.
Monsters could be harvested too. That was mildly irritating. Not because it was a major loss, but because it was an unnecessary one. And unnecessary waste always annoyed him.
So Ludger crouched near one of the shattered revenants and started checking the remains. At first, it looked like more of the same.
Stone limbs. Stone torsos. Cracked skulls. Everything built from that same mineral hardness, as though the creatures and their equipment had all been swallowed by the same process long ago.
Then he noticed something. He stilled for a moment and narrowed his eyes. Each of the monsters had a silver ring. Always on the left hand. Always on the pinky. And that ring was the only part that wasn’t made of stone.
Ludger picked up one broken hand and studied it more closely.
The fingers were rigid mineral. The cracks along the knuckles showed pale gray depth where his strikes had broken through. But the ring itself was real metal. Cold silver. Slightly dulled by age, but untouched by the transformation that had consumed everything else.
He checked another body. Same thing. Then another. Same again. Every single one. That made him frown. Because details like that rarely meant nothing in a labyrinth this structured. It could be rank. A symbol.
A mark of office, citizenship, family, or cult. Or something much worse. Something tied to why these things had become what they were while preserving this one tiny piece of themselves. Ludger turned one of the rings in his hand, expression unreadable.
A buried city. Headless statues. Stone inhabitants armed like old guards. And silver rings that somehow remained untouched.
Yes.
That was not random. And now the labyrinth had become more interesting than he initially expected. Ludger rolled one of the rings between his fingers and studied it in the dim underground light.
At first, he didn’t think much of it. They shouldn’t be especially useful. Or especially valuable. Not at a glance, at least.
The ring was small, plain, and lacking any obvious craftsmanship worth admiring. No gems, no elaborate engraving, no distinct symbol worked into the band. If it had been found in an ordinary pile of monster remains, most people would probably have tossed it into a pouch and forgotten about it until later.
Then Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly. The surface was too clean. Not polished in a fresh way, but untouched in a way that didn’t fit the rest of the creature. The revenants were made of weathered stone, worn by age, damage, and whatever twisted force kept them moving. Their weapons looked old. Their armor looked old. Their entire existence carried the dry ruin of something dead and dragged back into motion.
But the rings…
The rings looked preserved. He turned the band again and let a faint thread of mana brush across it. A tiny response came back. Subtle. But real. Ludger frowned.
There was mana in the silver.
Not enough to flare or reveal anything dramatic, but enough that the metal had a different feel from ordinary silver. It had been enriched somehow. Saturated. Changed by long exposure, deliberate treatment, or both.
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Mana-enriched silver.
That was interesting. He didn’t know much about it, though.
It had also been a while since he had forged anything seriously with his own hands. Most of his time had gone elsewhere, guild growth, fighting, infrastructure, routes, strategy, training, all the things that kept stacking themselves on top of each other. So even though he recognized that the metal mattered, he couldn’t immediately say what it was good for in practical terms.
Conductivity? Stability? Enchantments? Reaction to elements? He was still turning that over in his head when a voice behind him said, a little breathless but entirely too pleased with herself,
“You really weren’t going to wait.”
Ludger closed his eyes for half a second. Then opened them and looked over his shoulder. Elira had caught up.
Her glasses were slightly crooked, one loose strand of chestnut hair stuck to her cheek, and she was breathing harder than she was trying to show, which meant she had pushed herself to reach him and was now pretending that had been a perfectly reasonable decision.
Ludger looked at her, then at the distance she had apparently covered, and sighed.
“You’re still here.”
“You told me to leave after showing me something interesting,” Elira said, straightening up. “You disappeared before I could actually decide whether that counted.”
“That was enough to count.”
“For you, maybe.”
Ludger said nothing. Elira’s eyes dropped to the ring in his hand, and her whole expression changed immediately from stubborn triumph to sharp academic interest.
“Oh,” she said. “You found those.”
Ludger raised one brow. “You know what they are?”
Elira stepped closer and crouched near another broken revenant, lifting its ruined left hand carefully.
“Yes,” she said. “Those are one of the reasons this labyrinth matters so much.”
Ludger watched her. Elira adjusted her glasses with one finger and went on, her voice slipping naturally into explanation.
“That’s mana-enriched silver,” she said. “Or at least, that’s what most smiths and enchanters call it. It isn’t just silver that sat in mana for a long time. Not exactly. It’s silver that’s been saturated deeply enough that the metal starts behaving differently.”
She held the revenant’s hand up slightly, showing the ring more clearly.
“Normal silver is already useful in some magical applications,” she said. “It carries mana well, resists certain corruptive influences better than cheaper metals, and interacts cleanly with enchantment patterns. But once it’s properly enriched, it becomes much better for any work that needs stable mana flow.”
Ludger looked back at the ring in his own hand.
“Such as?”
Elira brightened a little at the question.
“Rune-work, for one,” she said. “Especially fine channels or trigger structures. If you’re making something that needs mana to move through it without dispersing too quickly, enriched silver helps a lot. It’s cleaner than crude conductive metals, more stable than a lot of alloys, and easier to integrate into high-quality enchantments.”
That got Ludger’s attention more fully. Elira noticed and continued at once.
“It’s also useful in catalyst work,” she said. “Alchemical tools, potion stabilizers, ritual anchors, sensory arrays, purification pieces… anything where you want mana to pass through a material in a predictable way rather than scatter. It won’t make bad work good, but it gives skilled crafters more control.”
She pointed lightly at the ring.
“And because this kind has already been enriched naturally, or unnaturally, depending on how you want to look at it, you skip part of the preparation cost. That matters a lot.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. Cost efficiency. Scalability. Crafting value.
Elira was still talking.
“Smiths like it too, when they can get enough of it,” she said. “Not usually as the main body of a weapon or armor piece, unless they’re making something specialized. But as an inlay? A channel? A layered component inside a relic? Very valuable. It helps distribute mana through a weapon more smoothly, which can reduce waste and sometimes improve activation consistency.”
That part made him think immediately of runic swords. Silver channels inside the grip. Along the core. In trigger junctions. In shield-reactive structures. That had possibilities. Elira shifted slightly, warming to the subject now that she had an attentive listener.
“The problem is supply,” she said. “Mana-enriched silver isn’t common enough to use carelessly. Most places that sell it charge a lot because it’s either mined from rare veins near mana-heavy regions, salvaged from old relic sites, or processed slowly with expensive methods. But here…”
Her gaze moved over the fallen stone revenants around them.
“Here the monsters are carrying it.”
Ludger followed her line of thought easily.
“Which means the guild can harvest it regularly.”
Elira nodded.
“Exactly. Not in massive bars or clean ingots. Just rings, sometimes fittings, sometimes small pieces in deeper sections. But over time, it adds up.” She pushed her glasses up again. “It’s one of the reasons Mother guards access to this labyrinth so carefully. Not because the silver alone makes us rich, but because what it enables matters. Smiths want it. Rune-workers want it. Certain healers and alchemists want it too. If you’re building quality gear instead of cheap volume, this kind of material becomes very attractive.”
Ludger looked at the rings scattered among the broken remains. So that was it. Not overwhelmingly valuable in isolation. But consistently useful. A refining material. An enhancement component. The sort of thing that multiplied the worth of other products instead of merely existing as a raw resource.
That was, in many ways, better. He crouched and started removing another ring.
Elira watched him for a second, then said, “You really didn’t know?”
“It’s been a while since I handled forging materials myself,” Ludger said.
That seemed to surprise her.
“I assumed you’d know all of this already.”
“I know enough.”
Elira smiled faintly. “That sounds like the sort of answer people give when they know less than they’d like.”
Ludger ignored that.
Instead, he asked, “Does the guild process it directly or sell it raw?”
Elira blinked, then her expression sharpened again.
“Both,” she said. “Mostly raw or lightly sorted right now, because deeper control over the silver requires specialists and time. We keep some for our own use, especially for maintenance and contracted crafting. But a lot of it gets sold or traded.” She paused. “Mother would prefer to scale that up if she had a more secure structure around the labyrinth.”