The Room Beneath the Glow Pools

After the crocodile, the party had less patience for guessing. The Glow Pools were still moving around them. Something stirred under the water, and the wrong rubble pile had already cost too much. Jonah wanted time to pray and heal everyone properly, but the place did not feel safe enough for a long pause. They needed the real entrance first. Victor took the next look with Jonah's guidance behind him. He chose the closer remaining area and searched more carefully than the first attempt had allowed. This time, the signs were better: a small pile of rocks near the back, something arranged enough to suggest blockage rather than natural rubble. It looked like a sealed passage, not a submerged predator waiting for someone to make noise. Blastbelle opened it the way Blastbelle opened things. She blasted through. The rocks scattered, and the old sewer entrance revealed itself. After the fake Lawful, the Graven Scourge ambush, the Boost vial, and the crocodile, the discovery felt less like triumph than permission to stop bleeding for a moment. The route was real. The stash mission could continue. The party climbed down. What waited below was not the open sewer channel they expected. The passage drained off to the side and became stone steps leading into a furnished room. It was not elegant, but it had been used. A bench sat inside. Barrels held fruit and vegetables that had gone rotten, but not ancient-rot, not forgotten-for-years rot. An axe lay on the table. The room felt like a hideout or staging chamber, a place someone had slept in occasionally and abandoned recently enough that the details still had meaning. That mattered. The Rat King-side sewer network was not only old infrastructure. Someone had been using this space. Someone had supplies here, a weapon here, and enough reason to keep returning. The party had not simply found a tunnel toward the stash. They had found evidence of recent occupation beneath the Glow Pools. Then Jonah got the pause he needed. The party settled into a short rest, and Jonah prayed to the Creator for their healing. After the street fight and the crocodile, the prayer was not only ritual. It was triage. It turned the hidden sewer room into a temporary chapel, because that was what Jonah did: he made survival sound like devotion. Above them, Gravenhurst kept moving. Below it, the old Thieves Guild route had opened. The next descent would not begin from the street anymore. It would begin from a room someone else had been using first.