Chapter 404 The Brothel Had an Excellent Dive Instructor

The bathhouse lady sent us to a brothel for diving advice, which was the first useful business referral I had received that included a warning about glitter getting into machinery.

We found it above the flooded shopping street, reached by stairs that Lukas climbed while I glided beside him. My wing still deserved some care, so I kept the trip short and settled onto the warm tiles outside. A sign advertised private rooms, good company, and equipment cleaning, which covered a surprisingly broad range of disasters.

[System: Before you start calculating rewards, walking through a brothel door doesn’t count as an achievement. Otherwise every delivery bloke in this town would be an immortal sex wizard.]

I came for advice, but now I want to know which delivery bloke ruined the reward scheme for everyone else.

Old Mate tapped the sign with his beer. [System: Bloke delivering towels tried claiming a group achievement. Hadn’t even taken his shoes off, the ambitious little grub.]

Lukas rang the bell, and an adult woman with silver bracelets opened the door. She wore a loose red wrap over a dark dress and looked at my wings before checking his climbing limbs.

"If you’re the window cleaners, you’re late, and the last pair left fingerprints somewhere that required an apology."

"We’re looking for the salvage diver. The bathhouse lady said she knew about the old pressure rooms."

"She does, but her consultation rate doesn’t include whatever expression your friend is practicing."

Lukas changed his smile instead of removing it. I had seen him face armed men with less commitment than he brought to a woman holding a price list.

Inside, the place smelled of citrus polish and warm food. Two adult women were arguing over a card game while a third repaired a diving harness at the reception desk. The harness woman had broad shoulders, sun-browned skin, and a thin scar across one eyebrow. Her open collar revealed enough to make me briefly forget why pressure rooms mattered.

Then she raised an oxygen valve beside her face, catching me staring at entirely the wrong equipment.

"If you came for salvage advice, put the diagram on the desk. If you came to tell me you’ve got impressive lung capacity, I’ve already heard it six times today."

I put the paper down and resisted explaining that I didn’t need lungs. Some facts only made a first impression worse.

We paid her two hundred credits before she touched the drawing. She showed us her salvage license, checked the numbered seal on our recovered diagram, and fetched a matching survey book from a locked cupboard.

Her survey book had bent corners and water stains, and she slapped my tendril away when I touched an old repair. Apparently two hundred credits bought advice, not permission to fiddle with her life’s work.

"The outer service route is safe with proper equipment," she said. "The final chamber has an old pressure gate, and nobody’s opened it on my watch. Your diagram includes a setting missing from our copy."

"I’ve handled tight entrances before, but I’d appreciate knowing what usually gets stuck."

Lukas made a choking noise behind me. I stared at the map with the desperate focus of a man who had heard his own sentence too late.

"Does he always make useful information sound like something I should charge him extra for?"

"Usually he needs another minute to get worse," Lukas said.

[System: Ask about lubrication next, mate. Might as well finish the job and get us thrown out before you’ve paid the deposit.]

That was a serious question. You lot keep adding filth to a perfectly reasonable discussion about getting through a hole.

She spread the drawings across the desk and placed three little weights on the corners. The first route ran through a submerged hotel kitchen. The second followed a service hall where equalizing valves still worked. Beyond that sat a sealed storehouse built into the cliff under the resort.

She crossed out a cracked side passage, pressing hard enough to tear the page. I quietly moved my tendril away from that route.

"No shortcuts through there. It opens into a much deeper shaft, and your body doesn’t care how confident you feel when the pressure changes."

I asked which doors Lukas could work safely and how deep we’d be going. She lowered the valve, apparently pleased that one of us had finally remembered my friend wasn’t a fish.

She fitted him with a full-face diving set and separate reserve supply, then found us paired pressure gauges, a line reel, and a waterproof case for his phone. Lukas tested the straps while trying to make an oxygen check look attractive, which took courage.

The equipment hire cost another hundred and fifty credits, with a refundable three-hundred-credit deposit. Lukas photographed the instructions and the marked map on his own phone, then put it safely away.

"When do you finish work?" he asked her while testing the mouthpiece seal.

"When people stop confusing this desk with a wishing well."

Lukas nodded as if she’d given him a time. I admired his ability to turn a closed door into an invitation to knock louder.

I tapped the hammerjaw beside the final door and asked whether somebody had improved it in a laboratory. She said it was a perfectly natural, deeply unpleasant fish, ruining my hopes of turning it into a packed lunch.

[System: Stop shopping for mutations, you lazy red bastard. See that gate on the left? Your mate shuts it behind the fish and you teach the ugly thing why doors are dangerous.]

That beats getting eaten outside a brothel with a map in my mouth, so explain the gate before Lukas asks about her evening availability. I studied the hinges with him and agreed he would close the deeper channel behind the fish.

Before we left, the diver turned to the final page of her book and compared a faded crest with the mark on our diagram. Her teasing expression disappeared, and she checked it twice.

"This isn’t a hotel safe," she said. "The resort was built above a royal shipping storehouse, and you’ve brought me its missing access instructions."

Below her finger, the inventory symbol showed a crown resting on three sealed treasure chests.