The creation chamber was full. When Xin'ri opened the doorway, its contents spilled in Tiwaz's room.

Sophia stared at the huge pile of blocks. It was not at all what Sophia expected; she'd expected a room with 3D printers or something, not a pile of magical boxes. The small ones seemed to be cubical and about four or five inches long on each side, but many were larger and rectangular. They were all either a dark metal with brighter blue glyphs or bronze with golden symbols. It was hard to tell, but Sophia thought that some of them had sides made of both metals. Some seemed dull, but many of them glowed weakly with magic.

"What the heck." Sophia had no idea what she was looking at, other than a bunch of enchanted lumps of metal. The magic didn't look like it was doing anything, but with that many enchanted boxes, it was more than she wanted to touch without an explanation.

"Something changed when you opened the door," Tiwaz noted. "What do you see?"

Xin'ri described the scene in more detail than Sophia could have managed. She even managed to name several of the glyphs that covered the boxes' faces and followed up with a description of the mana in the area. Sophia agreed with most of it, though she had no idea what the difference between an induced stability field and a projected stasis field was. Most of the boxes apparently had one or the other.

"Rune-empowered mana cubes," Tiwas muttered. He clearly understood what Xin'ri described better than Sophia did. "Why is the creation chamber filled with rune-empowered mana cubes, especially ones that are mostly discharged? They should only be created full, that's the entire point! They can't have simply leaked, either, not unless … Wait. Of course. The surge earlier would have washed past the creation chamber. Could it have…"

Sophia smiled to herself. She didn't know Tiwaz, but she was beginning to think he was a lot like other people she knew, people who would disappear into a problem and only emerge hours later or when it was solved. Dav could do that. Sophia wasn't as good at it, but she definitely agreed that there were few things better than solving a problem that she'd been working on for quite a while.

Xin'ri pulled a pair of oversized tongs out of nowhere and used them to pick up one of the boxes. She moved it a few feet away from its starting point and watched carefully, then took a few more steps. After that, it was one step, followed by a long pause, then another step and a pause. She made it halfway across Tiwaz's chamber before she set the cube down and made the tongs disappear.

She had a grin on her face when she turned towards the rest of the group. "I'm going to be busy with this for a while and I suspect Tiwaz will as well. Why don't you find a place to set up camp? I think we're going to be here for a while."

"Are you fully healed?" Dav asked in response, which made Sophia realize that he still glowed a faint green. She'd stopped noticing it quite a while ago.

"I think so," Xin'ri confirmed. "Though you have a point; I'll want to perform a full checkup on myself this evening."

It was a very good thing that Ci'an had thought to strike their campsites back in Othala's ruin. Sophia certainly hadn't thought of it, and if Dav had, he hadn't mentioned it, but the very first thing Ci'an did when they found a room that was large enough and empty enough was drop the tents. All they had to do now was go back and wet them up.

Well, that was the second step, at least. It wouldn't cover everything, and they definitely needed to clear out and clean the room first. It also wasn't the end of what they needed to do. Sophia's tent could handle everything she and Dav needed, and it was easy enough to stretch to covering Taika as well, but it couldn't really handle Ci'an and Xin'ri.

Fortunately, some of the kitchen enchantments still worked, including the water ones. Sophia suspected that was as much because they depended more on actual pipes as anything else; only the valves, temperature control, and purification were actually magical. The valves worked and either the purification worked or the water was pure enough to begin with that Sophia couldn't detect anything in it that was alive.

Sophia did use an enchanted stone that she usually didn't bother with for anything but boiled stream water to determine that there weren't any other toxins. They'd still want to boil the water just in case, but it seemed safe enough.

The temperature control did technically work, but it didn't work well. No matter how she adjusted it, the water always came out frigid, almost cold enough to freeze solid, and Sophia could tell it wasn't that cold in the pipes. It was annoying, but really, two of the three wasn't bad. She'd just have to ask Xin'ri to look at it when she had time.

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The hygiene area was … well, "significantly less functional" was the term Sophia eventually used when she told Xin'ri about it. The pipe that provided water to wash waste away was broken and the one that put water in the tubs delivered water that was so hot that most of it evaporated before it was cool enough to actually use.

There was also a shower system that provided enough water for a dozen people to shower at once, but the less said about that, the better. Sophia wasn't sure what was growing in the water that continually slowly leaked from the showerheads, but whatever it was smelled absolutely nasty. It was a good thing that the shower room was separated from the other rooms by a door that fortunately contained the smell.

Sophia, Dav, and Ci'an cobbled together a tank that would hold water for waste disposal, since the actual sewer pipes still seemed unclogged, but that was really all they could do with that set of rooms. It was certainly all they wanted to do.

By the time Xin'ri came to find them, they'd completed the survey, set up tents, and cleaned part of the kitchen, bathroom, and the room where they'd placed the tents. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. Cooking might be difficult, since they hadn't yet checked what survived in the kitchen other than the water supply. If nothing else, Sophia figured they could cook using the heat from the bathtubs' hot water. She might want to check its purity, too; it was basically already boiling, so if there wasn't anything unfortunate in the pipes, it ought to be safe once it cooled.

The first sign Xin'ri was back was the clatter of metal on stone as she dropped two of the cubes just inside the entrance. "You've made better progress than I expected."

"We know how to set up a camp," Ci'an stated with a grin. "Come on, you don't think all we do is fight, do you?"

"Well," Xin'ri paused just long enough for Sophia to guess that that was more or less what the crafter assumed. "I suppose not. No, certainly not. Goodness knows Lan'ti and his team weren't, and while you weren't there when we arrived, you did set up your own tent. I should know better; I'm just used to everyone expecting the Professionals to do all the regular chores. We get Abilities for it, why shouldn't we take advantage of them? Never mind that I don't actually have any Abilities for it. All I have is the ability to build myself tools."

Xin'ri sounded positively bitter.

"All I can promise is that we'll split the chores," Sophia offered. It didn't fix Xin'ri's past, but Sophia also wasn't responsible for Xin'ri's past. "Right now, that means you need to be working on fixing Tiwaz while the rest of us handle everything else. We'll help if you need us, but you're the expert."

Xin'ri snorted. "Expert? Hah. Maybe a little less confused than you, that's all." She stepped into her own tent long enough to get a folding chair, then settled down. "We have figured out a few things. The rune-covered boxes are some sort of mana storage. They're intended to be slotted into something he called localized arrays to do different things; I think the glyphs represent different mana types. They're unlike any other form of mana storage I've heard of, because when they're gone they actually disappear."

Sophia frowned at that. It wasn't the fact that they disappeared that was odd; instead, it was the fact that Xin'ri thought there were no other forms of mana storage that did the same thing. Monster cores could be used for mana, and they evaporated when the mana was used up.

But then, she hadn't actually seen a monster core in the Broken Lands, had she? The closest she could remember was from back when they killed the giant snake in Old Kestii, and that didn't come from the monster. It was a shard or something like that and it was the thing that maintained the snake's nest. It was really more like a dungeon core in that way, though it was far less capable.

"They're all going to need to be cleared out, and that's just the first step," Xin'ri continued. "Tiwaz has figured out that their presence is related to the mana drain that nearly knocked it out. Not long after you left, several more of the small boxes were created as mana flowed into the creation chamber through a path Tiwaz says shouldn't be there. About ten minutes after that, there was another large drain. Tiwaz can't tell what it was doing, but he thinks someone has set up the creation chamber to act like a temporary power storage for something big."

"Which means the second step is figuring out who and what," Sophia jumped ahead. There was something for her to do! She was happy about that; she'd worried she was just going to be keeping up with the camp chores and maybe exploring a little. That was interesting, but a mystery like this was better.

Xin'ri shook her head. "That's probably more like step four. We'll get there, for sure, but first we need to figure out how to stop it and repair the damage, then we can look into what's causing it. Unless we have to know what's causing it to stop it, then I guess that moves higher on the list."

"Are you trying to bait people into coming to check out what broke?" Dav asked doubtfully. "Because I don't know what did it, but stopping something that happens pretty regularly sounds like the kind of thing where someone might come looking. At least, assuming it's something intelligent, and that seems like a good assumption if they built a bypass for mana."

Xin'ri shook her head. "Tiwaz thinks the bypass is very old, probably around the time he went into hibernation, and the regular mana surges are a lot newer. They probably started within the past hundred years or so."

She laughed, but Sophia was pretty sure Xin'ri was laughing at the situation rather than thinking it was funny. "There's apparently a record of every single time it's happened. It's hard to tell exactly when everything happened, because the only other common log entries are a regular cleaning cycle and Tiwaz is pretty sure the cleaning cycle is needed more often with the regular influx and mana draw, but there are a handful of them near the beginning of the log and a lot of them hundreds of cleaning cycles later."

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