Deeper Down, Higher Stakes

Once again, we ended key collection on the layer with no failures. Fan Zhongying was particularly fired up—and worse for wear after he'd finished, saying that after being the only member of our sect to run out of time to cross the Cosmic River, he absolutely refused to disgrace the library by being the only one to fail at the 4th layer.

Even if this layer was smaller, the number of gates to the next were becoming fewer at a rate that outstripped that, so it took us several days to find a gate to the 5th.

"It's funny how deserted it's been down here," I said, taking the initiative to start a conversation for a change once we begun to explore the 5th layer, between magical beast attacks, "I mean, we did all that contingency planning on the way over, and we hardly had any trouble from the other sects other than that one big attack on the surface that they completely failed."