“Where were you carrying all that? That’s about eight-hundred coins.”

The robes the wizard was wearing had vanished, although he had been wearing a full set of clothes underneath. Jason pulled the robes back out of his inventory and held them up to examine. They were dark blue, but covered in the blood of their former owner.

Item: [Robes of the Astral Verdict] (bronze rank, rare)

Robes designed for summoning. (armour, cloth).

Effect: Increases the damage dealt by dimension spells.

Effect: Summoned creatures have increased damage reduction.

Effect: Damage reduction against disruptive-force damage.

Jason wasn’t ready to wear the clothes he took from a person he killed, especially when they were still wet with his blood. He returned the robes to his inventory and started searching about for something to cover the body. There was a fallen tapestry he dug out and laid over the corpse. Partly because he felt it was the decent thing to do. Mostly, though, he didn’t want the body out in the open while he searched the room, always at the edge of his vision. He needed to find anything he could to aid his escape from this place and its cannibalistic inhabitants.

He started by examining the magic circle in the middle of the room. It was large, around three metres across, the metal set directly into the floor. The lines were intricate and complex, like someone had started with a pentagram and gotten severely carried away. It was also damaged. Some of the metal had been pried up, other sections warped as if by great heat, although there was no indication of burning anywhere.

The circle wasn’t useful to him, so he started going through the rest of the room. He started with the big desk the potions had been in. There were no more potions, but there were a few tins of healing unguent, which he took. Unlike the plain tins he got from monsters, these tins were branded with some kind of logo.

“Greenstone Alchemy Association,” Jason read from the bottom of the tin. “I guess alchemy is a thing, too. Maybe I can pick up a crafting skill.”

The rest of the drawers contained piles of notes and diagrams that seemed related to the magic circle. Oddly, Jason could read the individual words despite never having seen the language before, but they didn’t make any sense to him as a whole. From what he could gather they were on some set of magical principles, as arcane to him as high-end theoretical physics. During his brief stint at university he studied political science. Regular science had never appealed.