It had now been seventeen days since she ate or drank water. She had become considerably slower and was more prone to just sit and stare at the box wondering why she is the one trapped on this rock.

  A few days back she had discovered the entrance a cave that was just pouring out flux, basically begging her to come.

  The entrance was not obvious. It was a metal door, blocking the entrance of the cave. It had been covered with accumulated surface drift, fine red-brown dust settling into every crevice — and she had uncovered it gradually, following the structured flux signature underground, cross-referencing it with surface topology until the pattern resolved into a shape. A door. Recessed into the rock face at the base of a formation she had walked past six times without looking at it correctly.

  The door was locked, but since when was a locked door enough to stop her. She sat there for hours with her flux welding skill to cut the door open. By the time she was done cutting the shape out she took a step back and kicked the cutout, it fell pretty easily.

  She went in. The cave had an elevator of some sorts after the door that went down. She wondered why it was still working when the planet was abandoned a while back according to what she has seen so far.

  The underground civilization had been built to be easy to be taken apart and reassembled else where. This would suggest that they had to move around with their homes a lot.

  That was the first impression and it didn't change as she went deeper. The structures were not rough-hewn or utilitarian — they were considered, proportioned, made with the attention of people who expected what they built to last and had been correct about that expectation. The walls were dark and metallic she didn't have a name for what metal that was, it was smooth and slightly reflective, with a surface quality that her flux perception read as faintly active even now, faint as a pulse in something very old and very nearly depleted.

  She moved through corridors that branched and reconnected in a pattern she couldn't fully map from inside it, generating her own notes in the memo tab as she went — left here, right here, this junction three times — because getting lost underground in a structure she didn't understand on a planet she'd crashed on was a category of problem she preferred to prevent. The corridors opened into chambers at irregular intervals, and the chambers were varied: some clearly functional, some clearly communal, some that defied the categories she was applying.

  The civilization had been small by the end, she thought. Or had always been small. The scale of the structures suggested a population that was measured in hundreds rather than millions, a community rather than a civilization in the planetary sense. They had built densely, efficiently, with a relationship to space that suggested they'd had exactly as much of it as they needed and not more.

  But something bothered her. How could just a hundred or so of ANYTHING build a civilization. That made no sense to her but her brain used the same excuse it always had when it came to things like this.

  "Well... They're aliens so...."

  She found what she was looking for on the third day underground (Yes she spent 3 days just roaming around in these dimly lit tunnels. She stopped every now and then to sleep but didn't stay long because she knew that if she sat for too long her hunger and dehydration would get the better of her.)

  She wasn't looking for anything specifically. But when she ran into a bigger locked door, she knew there was something she would want behind the door. She spent another 4 hours cutting open the door and when she finally came out the other side, she understood immediately that this was the thing the whole structure had been organized around. The center.

  The temple — she called it that because she didn't have a better word and the architecture earned it — was the largest space she'd encountered underground. The ceiling was high enough that her flux light didn't reach it, which after days of corridors felt enormous. The walls were the same dark metallic material as everywhere else but worked here with a density of detail she hadn't seen elsewhere — not decorative exactly, more like recorded, every surface covered in the weird script she'd been seeing throughout the structure and still couldn't read.

  In the center of the room was a pedestal.

  On the pedestal was a crystal.

  She stopped in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.

  The crystal was approximately her own height — she did this comparison automatically and immediately felt the comparison was inadequate, because the crystal was not the same category of thing as her height and putting them in the same sentence did neither any favors. It was green, deeply green, It was a color of green she could only describe as "Try- hard green" It was the greenest thing she had ever seen. The crystal illuminating itself from within in the slow steady way of something with a great deal of energy to express and nowhere particular to be.

  Hundreds of wires connected it to the walls. Fine wires, metallic, running from the crystal's surface in every direction, disappearing into the walls and presumably beyond — into the structure, into the infrastructure of everything she'd been walking through for three days, the crystallized power source at the heart of a civilization that had built everything around it.

  Her flux perception read it the way her perception read things that were significant and didn't have a category yet — a kind of fullness in the visual field, a presence that registered before she'd consciously processed what she was looking at.

  She took a step into the room.

  Then stopped, because something had surfaced in her memory.

  It arrived the way memories arrived — without announcement, without connection to what she'd been thinking about. An afternoon, a room she didn't recognize, people she couldn't see the faces of. A screen. The specific quality of movie sound from a decent speaker system. She was watching something — action, adventure, the genre trappings of a certain kind of film she knew she'd seen many of — and on screen someone was in a room not unlike this one, and there was something on a pedestal, and they reached out and touched it.

  The results were immediate and cinematic and extremely bad for the person who had touched it.

  She stood in the doorway of the temple and held the memory and thought about it.

  Tomb Raider? Indiana Jones? A dozen other films with the same basic lesson embedded in their narrative DNA, delivered across decades of popular culture with the consistency of a public safety announcement: Do not touch the thing on the pedestal. It was not subtle. It was not ambiguous. The accumulated wisdom of human adventure fiction had reached a clear consensus on this point and she had the memory of absorbing that consensus from a comfortable seat in a room with people she couldn't see the faces of.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  There was something different about these memory flashes that she saw. She was definitely sure that these were movies but some of them felt real. She didn't have the luxury to keep thinking about this because she was hungry.

  Research shows that when very hungry a human's cognitive ability can drop from anywhere between 10-20%. Basically her attention span was cooked and she couldn't focus on just one thing, until she looked at the crystal again.

  It was very beautiful.

  It was the most beautiful thing she had seen since waking up in the Andromeda Galaxy, and she had seen nebulae, and the comparison held. The green of it had a depth that the eye wanted to follow, a quality of internal complexity that made looking at it feel like looking into something rather than at something. The light it generated was warm in the specific way that she couldn't explain.

  Her Brain said: You know what happens when you touch the thing on the pedestal.

  Her Brain said: You have seen this exact situation in many movies and the result is consistent.

  Her Brain said: You are a person who has survived four months alone in the Andromeda Galaxy and a level one anti-flux Igo and a crash landing and a solar flare and second degree burns and you have done all of that through the application of careful systematic thinking and you should apply that thinking now.

  She walked across the room to the pedestal.

  She looked at the crystal up close. The wires were fine and numerous, the surface of the crystal where they attached slightly darker than the rest, the interface between the organic geometry of crystal and the deliberate geometry of manufactured wire. The pedestal itself was substantial, a column of the same dark metal as the walls, solid, with something at its base that she now registered as a device — a box, compact, attached to the pedestal's underside, with a visible flux signature of its own.

  She looked at all of this.

  She looked at the crystal.

  Her hand was already rising.

  Don't, she thought, with genuine clarity and complete ineffectiveness.

  She poked it.

  The lamination went first.

  She felt it happen — the flux membrane she maintained over her skin dissolving on contact, not slowly, not in the way things dissolved when she chose to release them, but pulled, extracted, the crystal taking it the way a drain took water. One moment it was there and the next it wasn't and the thin helium-heavy air of the underground space was on her skin and in her lungs and her lungs registered immediately that this was not an atmosphere she could sustain in without assistance.

  She held her breath.

  She tried to pull her hand back.

  Her hand did not move.

  Not because something was holding it — there was no visible restraint, no field she could identify, just the contact between her fingertip and the crystal's surface and the complete inability to break that contact, as if the option of removing her hand had simply been removed from the set of available actions without announcement.

  The flux drain continued. She could feel it now — not just the lamination but her actual reserves, the blue-green energy she'd spent months learning to manage and control, being extracted through her fingertip with the patient efficiency of a mechanism that had been built to do exactly this and had been waiting.

  She looked at the device at the base of the pedestal.

  The system, which had been running its analysis since she entered the room, chose this moment to provide information:

  OBJECT IDENTIFIED: FLUX CRYSTAL — CRYSTALLIZED FLUX MASS

  Classification: Extremely rare. Formed over geological timescales through the slow concentration and crystallization of ambient flux energy.

  Current status: Active absorption mode — field generator detected. The device attached to the pedestal is generating a localized absorption field around the crystal, causing it to draw flux from its immediate environment.

  Estimated original function: Perpetual power source. Flux drawn from environment crystallizes into the mass, which powers the field generator, which draws more flux. Self-sustaining cycle.

  Current absorption rate: Accelerating. Owner flux reserves: 61% and falling.

  She read this while not breathing and with her hand stuck to a crystal that was eating her alive, which was not her preferred reading conditions but she was working with what she had.

  Sixty-one percent. Falling.

  She looked at the device. Looked at the crystal. Looked at the hundreds of wires connecting the crystal to the walls and the one wire — thicker than the others, more substantial, running from the crystal directly down into the pedestal and from there to the device — that connected the crystal to the field generator specifically.

  One wire.

  She reached out with her free hand. The crystal had her right hand. Her left was available. She reached for the wire where it entered the device, got her fingers around it, and pulled.

  The wire came free with the particular resistance of something that had been connected for a very long time and had not expected to be disconnected.

  The absorption field collapsed.

  The flux hit her like a wave going the other direction.

  Without the field maintaining the absorption direction, the differential reversed — the crystal had an enormous concentration of flux and she had significantly less and the rules of flux diffusion that she'd learned in volume two applied immediately and completely. The crystal began giving rather than taking, the energy flowing back through the contact point, and her reserves climbed past the point she recognized and kept climbing.

  Her hand came free. She stepped back.

  Her reserves hit maximum. The overflow started — flux she couldn't hold, spilling out of her in the visible way of excess, the blue-green of it sheeting off her skin in the manner she usually only saw during intense practice sessions when she pushed past her ceiling. Her ceiling, which the manuals had described as modest and which months of practice had expanded considerably from the baseline, was not sufficient for what the crystal was currently attempting to give her.

  She thought fast.

  Inventory.

  She grabbed the crystal with both hands — it was warm, the internal light pulsing slightly at the contact, the diffusion still flowing — and pushed it toward her inventory with the same instinct she'd used on the asteroid rocks, the same wordless direction toward the pocket dimension attached to her flux field, and felt the resistance of something that was very large and not obviously an inventory item and pushed harder and—

  The crystal went in.

  The inventory registered it with a pause that she had never experienced from the inventory before, a small hesitation like a system blinking, and then:

  INVENTORY

  — NEW ITEM: Flux Crystal (Crystallized Flux Mass):

  1 Warning: Item is emitting passive flux diffusion.

  Inventory capacity consumption: Significant.

  Estimated time before inventory reaches saturation: 16:04:22 — diffusion rate is high.

  She stood in the center of the temple with the pedestal empty in front of her and the wires hanging slack from the walls where they'd been connected to the crystal and her flux reserves at a number the system was displaying with what she could only describe as concern, and she looked at the empty pedestal and breathed the underground air through her flux reinforcement which had reconstituted itself the moment the drain stopped and grinned.

  A grin she was aware was not entirely dignified. A grin she chose not to moderate.

  She had just put a geological-timescale flux crystal in her pocket.

  "Okay," she said to the empty pedestal, to the slack wires, to the temple with its unreadable walls and its ceiling she still couldn't see. "Okay. That worked out."

  The system added a note beneath the inventory entry:

  The system would like to note that touching unidentified objects on pedestals in unknown structures is not recommended.

  She looked at this for a long moment.

  "I know," she said. "I have seen the movies."

  She turned around and started walking back toward the entrance, memo tab open, documenting everything she'd seen, the grin still on her face in the dark underground of a dead civilization's greatest achievement.

  She had a long walk back.

  She didn't mind.