Eirian's magic found the storeroom first. In the northeast corner and once she could tell them where to dig, the soldiers uncovered the door in a matter of minutes.
It was somehow bigger than expected, but also smaller. Given the size of the manor, there would have had to have been additional storage somewhere else to supply the household.
The door was only tied shut, but it turned out to be an effective lock after a few decades under the dirt. It had solidified to the point that one of the soldiers had to whack it with a shovel several times before it finally gave way.
It took two of them to pry the door open and they accidentally ripped it clean off in the process.
Chenzhou sighed. He didn't look particularly pleased, but he didn't say anything. Recognizing it was pointless.
Unsurprisingly, it was dark inside, so Eirian sparked a couple of torches while they waited for the cellar to aerate.
"I hope they didn't store meat down there." Emmy grimaced. Patrick and Finn kept trying to peer inside, only to have to retreat after a few breaths from the rotten air.
"Gods that smells…actually, I don't know what it smells like." Finn's nose wrinkled and he sniffed. He immediately paled and swayed, and Yuze yanked him back.
"Okay, both of you back up. Who knows what you're breathing in."
"Probably mold." Lord Zhao says, so seriously both Finn and Patrick panic.
"What happens when you breathe in mold?" Patrick demands, forgetting all propriety in his panic.
Lord Zhao completely misses the social cue of Eirian and Chenzhou shaking their heads at him and starts listing increasingly worse effects. "Common afflictions can be as simple as coughing, sneezing, eye irritation. Long-term inhalation can weaken your immune system, leading to increased chances of illness and frailty. Some molds can cause hallucinations, night terrors, and insanity. There's a mold spore that grows in the Blooming Gorge that makes you bleed from your eyes and ears until you die if breathe it in."
"How long does that take?" Finn's voice was small and shaky.
Lord Zhao didn't notice as he picked up the broken door and studied it. "A day or two. They've never found anything that stops the bleeding, so it's really just a matter of how fast your blood replenishes."
Finn and Patrick weren't the only ones staring at him now.
"Well, I guess that's one place I'll never visit," Chenzhou mutters.
Eirian, who'd visited it once on a diplomatic trip to Song and Snow, shook her head. "It's beautiful. Thousand-foot cliffs covered in a species of hanging orchid lotus hybrid that blooms in every season. Some wizard thousands of years ago created it and the only place it grows on the rock is that gorge."
Finn wasn't buying it. "But you die if you go there?"
"You don't die just from visiting. There are bridges across the gorge. You only run the risk of inhaling the mold if you go down to the bottom where the riverbed is."
"The mold is in the water?" Patrick yelped.
Eirian turned to him in disbelief. "No." Patrick and Finn relaxed. "It's in the hundreds of thousands of bodies that washed away in the river that runs through the gorge."
Chenzhou's eyes went wide in surprise.
Finn squeaked. "What?"
"Song and Snow has a large population, but every few hundred years their agricultural sectors are destroyed by storms, and the land plunges into famine. The last time it happened, nearly half the population of Song and Snow perished and because of the landscape and the location of the Blooming Gorge, a lot of corpses end up washed down into the riverbed."
"That is worse," Finn said.
"So much worse," Patrick added.
"I have even less desire to see it than I did before." Chenzhou decided.
Eirian sputtered. "It's not like you can see the corpses from the top of the gorge. It's a thousand feet down. And most of them are buried by the time they get down there anyway."
"That's not helping," Chenzhou told her.
"Don't be so squeamish. It's a part of life."
"Famine?"
"Decomposing bodies." She paused. "Well, famine too, I guess."
"Nevertheless, I think I'm going to strive to avoid both of those parts of life." A small smile made its way onto Chenzhou's face.
Eirian gave him a flat look. "You can't avoid everything."
"You can avoid some things." Yuze muttered, so Eirian glared at him too.
"I think it's safe to go in now." Li broke in, sticking a burning torch into the doorway of the cellar and watching the flames shift.
The man was turning out to be more a peacekeeper than anything else, Eirian absently noted as the flames shifted and steadied, signifying enough oxygen in the air in the cellar to keep the flame alive. "Finally." She started for the door, but Chenzhou pulled her back.
"Why do you keep trying to go into dangerous places first?" He demanded.
Eirian waved a hand in his face. "Because I have magic. What's going to beat me?"
"You just lost a fight to a ghost." Yuze pointed out.
Eirian's temper sparked, defensive and bright. "I didn't lose." She hissed. "I just haven't figured out how to win yet."
Before she could pull free and step inside, one of Li's guards dove into the entrance headfirst.
Eirian's temper fizzled out at the ridiculous sight of his feet sticking out the doorway until he got himself twisted the right way around. She turned to Li, who looked unrepentant.
"No one improves without practice, your grace. Please allow yourself to rest and my men to develop some skills." He even bowed respectfully at the end of it.
Speaking of skills, Eirian hadn't been that swiftly or subtly chastised since she was a child. And somehow, he'd done it in such a way that she wasn't even angry.
Which was impressive, since Eirian was well aware of exactly how short her temper was.
~ tbc