The quiet pressed down like a hand over his mouth.
Ren moved forward slowly, his flashlight beam slicing a narrow cone through the darkness ahead. His boots left ripples in the shallow water with each step, but there was no echo—not a single one. The sound just vanished, as if the tunnel walls were swallowing it.
He stopped. Clapped once.
Slap.
Nothing came back.
He turned in a slow circle. Behind him, the way he’d come sloped back into blackness—collapsed stone and twisted piping sealed that path for good. Ahead, the tunnel stretched on with perfect symmetry. Same width. Same curve. Same oppressive hush.
His breathing felt too loud.
He tapped the flashlight once to steady his hand. It didn’t flicker yet, but the LED ring was dimmer than before. He’d checked the charge—70%. It should’ve lasted all night.
Ren kept moving.
The floor shifted beneath him slightly, not in texture, but in feel. It was still smooth stone, but something in the slope changed. A trick of balance, almost like walking on the curve of a bowl that looked flat.
He picked a number—twenty steps.
He walked them slowly, counting in his head, tapping one finger against his thigh with each one.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five...
His flashlight passed over a line of wall carvings again. Curves. Spirals. He remembered seeing that one ten steps ago. He paused. Turned back.
It was there again.
The same set of spirals, exactly the same shape.
But he hadn’t turned. The tunnel hadn’t looped. Had it?
He turned around in place twice, the flashlight cutting slices into the dark like a blade, revealing the same repeating ridges, the same grooves, again and again. He bent down and touched the wall.
The carvings were deep. Too perfect to be erosion. His thumb traced the edge of a spiral.
Exactly the same depth as the last one.
“Okay,” he said out loud. His voice sounded muffled, like he was speaking into cloth.
He unzipped his coat pocket, pulled out a red Sharpie, and drew a line across the spiral.
He walked forward.
Counted twenty more steps.
Stopped.
Turned.
The red mark was there again.
But there had been no curve. No turn. Just a straight tunnel.
He wasn’t imagining it.
The tunnel was looping itself without moving.
Ren’s throat tightened.
“Okay. Okay, okay—”
He turned his light toward the floor, checking for imperfections. Cracks, details, anything to break the illusion. But everything looked too clean. Not machine-built—just ancient, and decided. Like the tunnel had been planned by something that didn’t care about human geometry.
He knelt.
Pressed his ear to the ground.
No sound.
No hum of distant flow, no groan of pressure, no tunnel breath.
Just silence.
He stayed there a moment longer than he meant to. The silence wrapped around him, not quite heavy—but present.
He stood, quickly.
The flashlight flickered.
He smacked it once. It steadied.
Then flickered again.
His breath came faster now.
Focus.
Follow the air.
That’s what his grandfather always said. “In any system with no lights, no maps, no truth—follow the air. It never lies.”
Ren straightened. Closed his eyes.
Breathed in.
There. A whisper. A pull. Cooler air brushing the side of his neck.
He turned toward it. Not the main tunnel. A small side passage, partly hidden behind a square recess in the wall.
He stepped toward it—and felt a gust.
Air. Not much. But definite.
A vent, or an exit. Somewhere air was moving out of this place.
Somewhere he could go.
He didn’t hesitate.
He ducked into the side tunnel, flashlight leading, and walked fast—no more counting.
No more red markers.
Just the air.
The side tunnel narrowed quickly.
Ren had to hunch forward as the ceiling sloped down, his shoulder grazing the left wall as he moved. The flashlight cast jagged shadows across the ribbed stone, and every few seconds it caught flashes of something glinting along the wall’s edge.
He paused.
Bent down.
A thin trickle of water was snaking its way along a groove in the wall—clear water, not cloudy or backed-up like the flood runoff. It clung to the surface like sweat, moving too deliberately to be natural. Like it was guided.
He touched it with two fingers.
Cool. Fresh. No foul smell.
It was flowing—not still.
He shifted the flashlight toward its path. The groove in the wall bent slightly downward and away from him, then split into two narrow channels and rejoined again farther ahead. It was some kind of passive flow control system. Gravity-based. Old tech. Very old.
His grandfather had shown him diagrams once—ancient drainage tunnels from desert civilizations that used stone-carved veins to move water where they wanted it. No machines. Just precision.
And here it was, under… wherever this was.
Ren followed it.
The further he went, the more he noticed the change in the air. It wasn’t just moving—it smelled different. Cleaner. Less rust, more earth. The kind of scent you only noticed in contrast, like the first inhale after leaving a smoke-filled room.
The side tunnel fed into a wider corridor, this one flat and square, built from interlocking stone tiles that hummed faintly under his boots. They weren’t vibrating. It was more like a pressure—a sensation in his feet that made him feel like the floor remembered things walking across it.
He hesitated at the entrance.
Then stepped inside.
The space opened gradually, walls stretching outward until he stood in what felt like a corridor the width of a city street—but without a single visible light.
His flashlight flickered again, dimmed to a ghostly glow.
He tapped it. It steadied.
Again, he caught the movement of water.
The same trickle, now running in two mirrored channels along the corridor walls, curving like veins around support pillars and rejoining at regular intervals.
He reached out and touched one.
Still cool. Still flowing.
He looked upward.
High above him—he guessed twenty meters—thin shafts of something between light and shadow pierced the ceiling. Not sunbeams. Something dimmer, blueish. And yet enough to cast faint lines down to the floor in uneven, flickering bands.
He tilted his head back farther.
There were holes. Round. Vent-sized.
The air was coming from there.
He stepped forward. The tiles under his feet gave a soft, hollow thud that echoed faintly—finally, sound. It bounced, irregular, but real.
Encouraged, he picked up his pace.
The corridor curved slowly left.
The airflow remained steady, brushing past him like a gentle draft from a cracked window.
If there was air, there was an exit.
And if there was an exit, maybe—just maybe—he was closer to getting aboveground.
The wall carvings returned, but not spirals this time. These were lines. Rows. A language maybe, or just diagrams. Arrows pointed in multiple directions—downward, sideways, some up—but none toward him.
He traced a finger across one. The grooves were shallower here, but precise.
Too precise to be eroded. Too smooth to be hand-chiseled.
This place wasn’t forgotten.
It had simply been ignored.
He kept walking. Faster now. Water trickling beside him. Air in his lungs. His heart steadying.
Then something new appeared ahead—a tiled archway, built from bricks that didn’t match the stone around them. They were red, glazed, cracked at the edges like kiln-fired ceramics. Ren slowed.
Beyond it, the floor dropped slightly, and the sound of water deepened—not just trickling, but pooling. Gathering.
He stepped under the arch.
The arch swallowed him whole.
Ren stepped through and immediately noticed the temperature shift again—cooler here, almost sharp. The sound of the trickling water multiplied, bouncing off the walls in layers. It didn’t echo cleanly; it folded back in on itself like voices in a long, tiled bathroom.
He swept his flashlight across the corridor.
The red ceramic bricks covered every surface—floor, walls, ceiling. Each one slightly different in size and color, as if taken from multiple sources and fitted together by hand. Some bore scratches, soot, or old tool marks. Others were smooth and glazed with what looked like centuries of grime.
It didn’t feel like one tunnel anymore.
It felt like a museum.
Ren ran his hand along the wall. The bricks were cool, slightly curved. Some were stamped with numbers. One had a curled letter—P—another had a triangle in a circle. Random? Or salvaged?
The corridor forked again, this time with no warning. Two doors.
Left: a rounded frame sealed in rusted iron, paint flaking off like it had been underwater. Cyrillic letters barely legible on a corroded plaque: СТАНЦИЯ 3-Г.
Right: a stone doorway decorated in pale blue mosaic, tiled in hexagonal fragments. Patterns curled across its surface—geometric, flowing, like something from an old hammam. Arabic script lined the upper corners.
Ren blinked.
Neither door matched anything remotely Japanese. Or even regional.
He stepped back. Turned the flashlight upward.
Above him, centered at the highest point of the arch, was a single mark carved into the ceiling slab: a triangle made of three arrows chasing each other’s tails.
He stared at it.
Then chose the mosaic path.
The air was drier. Less humid. The light grew dimmer, but the sound remained constant—water running, always running. The tunnel narrowed into a smooth, rounded passage tiled from floor to ceiling in chipped blue and white ceramics. It looked almost decorative. Luxurious.
This was no sewage tunnel.
It was a place.
Ren slowed as he moved through, trying to read the script, but it was too faded—only fragments of words remained. And yet, this didn’t feel abandoned. It felt… hidden. Preserved.
He passed another corridor, this one bricked in small black stones arranged in fish-scale patterns. Then another—yellow clay bricks with soot-blackened mortar. Then another—corrugated steel panels bolted into poured concrete.
Each one was different.
Each one was from somewhere.
But all of them—here.
“Why?” Ren whispered. “Why build this down here?”
His voice didn’t echo.
He pressed forward.
Eventually, the corridor opened into a chamber. Not large—but circular, tiled floor to ceiling in tiny blue pieces. At the center: a shallow pool, perfectly still. Thin light filtered from somewhere above—a vertical shaft or vent. Ivy dangled from the opening, thick and green, curling in lazy tendrils down into the pool like fingers reaching for water.
Ren stepped closer.
The air smelled like open sky.
The light was real.
He looked up.
Way above him—a metal hatch. Old. Bolted. Partly open.
A rope of ivy had grown through its edge, curling down the shaft. He reached toward it. It was strong. Thick. Alive.
A ladder. A way up.
Maybe even… out.
He looked around the chamber once more.
The different corridors. The mismatched architecture. The careful preservation of history that didn’t belong here.
This wasn’t just underground infrastructure.
This was a collection.
A system made of stolen places.
Ren stood beneath the shaft, breathing through his mouth. The air smelled different up here. Fresher. Dry, almost mineral-rich, like the breath of mountain air just after sunrise.
He looked up again.
The hatch overhead was circular, cast from dull metal and rimmed with bolts. It was partially ajar—enough to let a shaft of soft light pour down, striking the still water of the basin below. Ivy curled through the cracks, thick vines glistening with dew or condensation.
He reached up.
His fingers brushed the metal.
Warm.
Real.
He looked at the ivy. Thick enough to grip, but unpredictable. He ran a hand along one of the vines, testing its strength. It held. Tense, alive, latched into stone like veins through bone.
Still, it wasn’t the ivy he trusted.
It was the ladder.
Half-concealed by the vines, a rung of corroded metal caught the light. Then another.
Ren reached for the lowest one, tugged.
It held, but creaked.
“Better than swimming,” he muttered to himself.
He hoisted the pack tighter to his shoulders and pulled himself up slowly. Each rung groaned, some with rust flaking off as he passed. His boots slid once on the slick metal, but he caught himself, pressing a shoulder to the stone to steady his balance.
The shaft narrowed as he climbed. The light brightened. The warmth increased.
It wasn’t artificial.
It was sun.
Real sun.
His heart quickened.
He climbed faster now. Ivy brushed his coat, coiling lazily around his arms like soft restraints. His flashlight bounced against his chest, still dim but not yet dead.
Five more rungs.
Four.
Three.
He reached up—both hands flat on the underside of the hatch.
It didn’t move at first.
He pushed again.
The metal scraped loudly—old rust against rust, a dry screech that echoed up and out.
Then it gave.
A sliver of bright white light spilled through the gap, so sudden it blinded him. He squinted, head ducked low, and pushed it fully open with his shoulder.
A gust of dry air rushed down into the shaft.
Cool. Wide. Real.
He pulled himself through, twisting onto the stone lip, the hatch’s edge scraping his coat.
His boots clinked against a worn stone surface—flat, cracked, covered in dirt and flecks of green moss.
He was outside.
Ren crawled forward, shielding his eyes as the light burned across his vision in a wash of sky and white.
Blue. Clear.
He blinked rapidly, adjusting.
The world slowly resolved.
He was on a small hilltop of crumbling stonework surrounded by trees—taller, thinner than the ones near Shiohama. Their leaves were smaller, tighter. The smell of salt was gone. The scent here was earth and metal and old rain.
He turned in place.
To his left: the entrance of the shaft he’d emerged from—half-covered in ivy, nestled between two mossy columns like forgotten ruins.
To his right: a narrow stone stairway, partially eroded, winding downward toward a pale brown ridge.
And just past that, at the base of the hill—
Buildings.
Terracotta rooftops.
Signs. Cars.
But the signs didn’t have kanji.
They had accents. Curves. Latin letters.
French.
Ren stared.
He pulled the phone from his pack.
No signal.
No reception.
Just the date.
Still today.
Still now.
But everything else…
He wasn’t in Japan anymore.
He stood up too quickly and swayed, momentarily dizzy. The sunlight, though muted by passing clouds, was still too bright after so long in the dark. His eyes strained to adjust.
The sky stretched overhead—open, wide, pale blue. Clouds drifted in thin ribbons across the horizon, not the heavy, choking storm clouds of Shiohama, but wispy ones that let light through like paper.
The silence was different here, too.
Not the heavy, breathless kind he’d felt underground—but wide, natural silence. The kind that carried wind, birdsong, and the far-off hum of distant city life. That alone told him he wasn’t beneath anything anymore. He was above it all now.
Ren turned slowly in place, taking it in.
The hilltop was flat, roughly circular, ringed with what looked like half-buried ruins. Cracked flagstones beneath his feet. Moss-covered columns, waist-high, marked the edge of the plateau. A broken statue, just a foot and a partial ankle left, jutted from the earth like a fossil. The ivy that had guided him out of the shaft curled around everything.
This place hadn’t been touched in decades.
But beyond it?
Civilization.
He stepped carefully to the ridge’s edge and looked down.
Rooftops stretched into the distance—terracotta orange and red, sloping tile after sloping tile. Narrow streets coiled between them like snakes. He spotted clotheslines, balconies, potted plants. Cars. People moving about—casual, slow, unaware.
And street signs.
He focused on one, where two roads crossed near a roundabout.
Rue des Arènes.
He blinked. Focused harder.
The sign beneath it read: Sens interdit.
He recognized a few of the words. From school. From manga subtitles. From Layla, the French exchange student who once spent a month at his school last year.
“France,” he whispered, mouth dry.
No. That didn’t make sense.
That couldn’t make sense.
But the buildings… the signs… even the light felt different. The angle of the sun. The smell of the dust. The air was drier here. Higher up. Inland.
He backed away from the ridge and sat down heavily on a worn slab of stone.
His brain tried to push it back into logic.
He had fallen into a collapsed sewer tunnel beneath Shiohama. He’d followed strange air currents. Climbed a shaft covered in ivy.
And now…
He wasn’t anywhere near Shiohama.
He wasn’t in Japan.
He rubbed his hands over his face. The scratches stung. His wrists ached from the climb. His legs were soaked and stiff. And still—he had no phone signal. No compass reading. No idea how far from home he actually was.
He pulled out the map again.
The one his grandfather had drawn.
Unfolded it carefully.
And there, in one of the farthest corners, past the edge of the sketched Shiohama coastline, faint pencil lines looped into foreign scripts.
An arrow.
A name. Barely legible.
“Arènes”—circled, twice.
Ren froze.
He looked up.
Back at the street sign.
Rue des Arènes.
His grandfather had known.
He had drawn it here.
Years ago.
Ren’s chest tightened.
He looked down again at the scrawled symbol next to the name—three arrows chasing each other in a triangle.
Just like the carving in the ceiling of the corridor.
Whatever this system was—whatever was buried beneath cities, continents, oceans—it was not just Japanese.
And it was not random.
It was connected.
All of it.
And now Ren was in it.