Noah stood in the shrine a while longer after the system's translation faded from the floating screen, looking at the carved face with no eyes, before he finally turned away and started walking again.
Ivy followed him through a second opening at the shrine's far end, smaller than the entrance they'd come through, and the passage beyond it climbed. Not steeply, but steadily, the kind of grade that didn't ask much of his legs but kept rewarding him with the unmistakable sense that the air around him was thinning into something fresher, less recycled by centuries of being trapped underground.
"You feel that," Noah said. "Air's moving up here. Real air, not whatever we've been breathing for the last few hours."
Ivy's nostrils flared once in agreement.
