The dungeon produced one hundred gold worth of materials per clear. The healer on the team made ten silver per session. Someone had done this math and decided it was acceptable.
The field healing rotation was, officially, a practical education in collaborative dungeon operations.
Kael treated it as a data collection exercise. He had eleven items in his Queue related to the dungeon ecosystem, four related to the Support Registry's economic structure, and a monitoring flag on the party leader named Torvan who explained the revenue split on the walk to the Rank E dungeon with the tone of a man stating weather facts.
'Guild takes twenty percent. Permit fee eight gold. Combat members split the remainder six ways. You—' a nod at Kael — 'get the support rate. Ten silver per session.'
His Monitor logged the number automatically and cross-referenced it with the revenue estimate he'd calculated from the Shell Crawler yield data in the dungeon ecology texts. The ratio was: approximately one to one hundred and sixty.
One silver earned per one hundred and sixty silver generated.
He did not say anything. He filed it under Political — Support Registry — Economic Structure and flagged it HIGH PRIORITY, LONG TERM ACTION REQUIRED.
The dungeon itself was more immediately interesting.
Stone Crawlers were Rank E — large, armored, aggressive when threatened, straightforward in their mana biology. They used mana to reinforce the carapace and had a simple mana circulatory pattern that his System mapped across the first two levels, using the automatic logging discipline he'd been building for months. By level three, he had a working anatomical model of a Stone Crawler's mana network that was significantly more detailed than anything in the Academy's published ecology texts.
He also had specimen containers, which he had brought deliberately.
Torvan noticed on day three. 'What are those for?'
'Research.' He held one up to the light. The bioluminescent lichen sample inside gave off a faint green glow. 'This species has a mana absorption spectrum I want to characterize. And the crawler carapace material has mana-resistance properties the published literature only describes qualitatively. I want the quantitative data.'
'You're not getting paid for that.'
'I know.'
On day nine, he did something that wasn't in the rotation curriculum: while closing a laceration on a Combat student named Perris, he ran a mana thread into a compressed channel junction in her knee and expanded it from the inside.
Perris's knee stopped aching immediately. She looked at it. Looked at him.
'That's not a standard heal,' she said.
'No,' he agreed. 'It's channel decompression. The impact compressed a flow junction. Releasing it removes the pain source rather than masking it.'
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she went back to the formation without further comment, which was, Kael found, the best possible response. It meant she was processing rather than reacting.
On day fourteen, in a side chamber on level seven, he found a dead Stone Crawler with its carapace dissolved from the inside.
He stopped. Crouched. Ran his mana-sense over the remains.
Something had gotten into the Crawler's mana network — not through the carapace, which was the armor, but through a junction gap in the ventral surface — and disrupted the channel structure from within. The disruption was biological in signature. Not a spell. A living system, or something a living system had produced.
His System flagged this under a new header: INTERNAL DISRUPTION — DUNGEON ORIGIN. Related to: scalpel delivery vector hypothesis. Cross-reference: if something in this dungeon does this naturally, the principle is real.
He collected a sample very carefully and brought it back to Oswin's archive.