The expedition reached the core chamber on the seventh day.
Seven days underground. Seven days of active darkness, guardian constructs, trap mechanisms that ranged from the merely lethal (pressure-triggered ceiling collapses that dropped two-ton stone blocks onto corridors with millimeter accuracy) to the divinely complex (rooms where spatial geometry inverted, turning floors into ceilings and gravity into a suggestion rather than a law). Seven days of advancing through the dead god's architecture with the methodical patience of sappers clearing a minefield, measuring every step against the probability that the next step was the one designed to kill them.
