Three delvers stepped over the most profitable material in the room.
Marco stayed against the wall and let them pass.
They wore matching green jackets with a boar's head stitched over the shoulder, the kind of small sponsored team that could afford coordinated gear without affording anybody to carry it. Two bulging harvest sacks hung between them. The third man dragged a ridge-crawler hide folded wet-side-in over one arm.
“Gallery's stripped,” he said as they reached Marco. “You heading deeper?”
“Not today.”
The man glanced at Marco's G-striped license and the short spear strapped to his pack. His expression settled somewhere between sympathy and dismissal.
“Then you missed it.”
Marco waited until their lights vanished around the bend.
Ed Boone stood at the gallery mouth with the other four entrants, spear across his chest. “Twenty-five minutes in this room. Pairs stay in sight. I don't care how worthless the thing you're looking at is.”
The farmed gallery looked empty in the way a grocery shelf looked empty after somebody took every intact package. Bluecap stumps covered the warm ledges. Harvesters had removed the broad caps and most of the central stems. Brown curls of skirt tissue remained attached along the lower edges, ragged where hurried knives had torn them.
At the back of the gallery, a beetle carcass lay on its shell. Someone had split the mana-rich inner plate and taken the two cleanest sections. The fractured edges and joint scales remained.
None of it was valuable enough to slow a fast team carrying full sacks toward a permit deadline.
Marco set his pack down.
His group block gave him three hours along the overfarmed route. The fee was low because the county expected little competition for anything worth killing. He had no reason to rush merely because other people had already found the obvious parts.
Marco checked the fungus and removed only the pale, flexible skirts. Dried sections and dark rot stayed on the ledge. Ridgeway work had taught his hands the motion; the public gallery gave him no production line to hide how slow he remained.
Twenty-six minutes filled one mesh bag.
The abandoned beetle offered four intact joint scales and one strip of clean laminate beside its shattered center. The recovery might gross eighteen dollars and took eleven minutes.
If he could not make that ratio improve, the niche was an underpaid hobby with dungeon insurance.
Near the next route marker, the passage split around a pillar of chalky stone. One side held fresh boot prints. The other held crawler scat and a wall sensor showing green.
Marco showed Boone both branches. The warden smelled the scat, studied the ceiling, and chose the boot prints without calling the other side safe.
The popular path ended at another harvested bed. This one had been cut more cleanly, with almost no skirt tissue left. He found three usable curls beneath an overhang, then stopped searching when five minutes produced nothing else.
Beyond it, pale fungal threads ran through cracks in the wall.
They were not saleable. They were too thin to peel and too deeply rooted to sample without damaging the bed. Still, their density changed every few feet. Thick near one bluecap cluster. Sparse across the cold gray stone. Thick again beneath the next harvested ledge.
Marco touched the back of two fingers to the wall. The dense patch felt warmer.
He took a chalk nub from his route pouch and marked the edge of the warmth at knee height. Seven long steps farther, the temperature fell. He marked that too.
The next warm section began almost exactly the same distance beyond the cold interval.
Dungeon geology repeated patterns. Ventilation, water, mana flow, and old quarry cuts could all shape where fungus grew. Marco had learned enough not to turn three beds into a theory.
He measured anyway.
At the last permitted shelf, a dead tunnel rat had already lost its hide, tendons, and catalyst node to another delver. One cheap scent sac remained intact beneath the jaw.
Marco's skill said usable. The processor sheet said barely saleable. His watch said he had time.
Four minutes added the sac to his pack. The ruptured one stayed with the carcass.
On the return, he passed the farmed gallery again. New visitors had entered: a woman with an F-rank badge and active-license marker and a boy who could not have been older than eighteen. They were cutting bluecap caps from a bed Marco had checked on the way in.
The woman saw the mesh bags on his pack.
“Skirts?” she asked.
“Mostly.”
“Processor actually takes those?”
“If they're clean.”
She looked at the ledge, then at her own permit timer. “Not at what my hour costs.”
There was no contempt in it. Only arithmetic.
“Probably not,” Marco said.
He exited nine minutes ahead of plan.
The first outing grossed one hundred forty-nine dollars. Access, insurance, processing, bait, and consumables took seventy-two. Seventy-seven remained.
The beetle filler accounted for seventeen dollars. Fungus skirts brought eighty-one. The scent sac added fourteen. The balance came from small legal mineral samples and a bundle of intact fungal stems missed beneath an overhang.
Emma read the receipt twice.
“The garbage paid more than the organ.”
“Discarded material,” Marco said.
“The processor calls it secondary biological scrap.”
“That's because they want people to accept fourteen dollars.”
Sarah put a plate of pasta in front of him. “Eat before negotiating with paperwork.”
Marco had brought twelve arrows home intact. He still bought six more on Tuesday.
The outfitter charged eighty-four dollars for the same basic dungeon shafts he had been losing at fourteen dollars each. Buying them erased more than the first run's profit, but waiting until he ran low would force him either to cancel a permit or carry too little margin underground.
Emma entered the purchase in a separate line.
“Running total says minus seven,” she said.
“Before the next outing.”
“The next outing has not happened.”
Marco set the six inspected shafts beside the old twelve. “You enjoy this too much.”
“I enjoy money obeying time.”
He numbered the new arrows thirteen through eighteen. Each passed the roll test and flexed without noise. One had a nock seated slightly left of the fletching seam. Marco marked it for a practice shot aboveground rather than trusting it on a live target.
No equipment purchase felt like progress while it sat on a kitchen towel waiting to be inspected.
It felt like six additional ways to lose fourteen dollars.
At Ridgeway, Cal began leaving questionable pieces at Marco's station.
“Professor of Garbage,” he said. “Thesis defense.”
Some were worth saving. Most were not. By Thursday, Marco had spent nine extra minutes examining a yellow tray and fallen eleven minutes behind Harlan.
“People asking your opinion does not remove your line assignment,” Nia said.
Marco limited the questions to natural pauses. He finished only four minutes behind instead.
“How do you know before you touch it?” he asked Harlan.
“I don't. I know which things aren't worth finding out.” Harlan nodded toward the smaller delay. “You're improving at that part.”
Marco used what survived the week to propose one trial tote for beetle joint plates. Nia approved it only if the cleaned lot paid for the labor it created.
Finding value produced another job before it produced money.
Outing Five started on a Thursday because Ridgeway had moved his Friday shift to cover a contractor delivery. Marco used an open place in a three-person weekday group rather than buying a crowded weekend block.
The county station attendant recognized him before she scanned the license.
“Trash route?”
“Farming gallery.”
“That's what I said.”
She pulled the latest condition report. “Two beetle nests logged past Marker Nine. One cleared yesterday, one unconfirmed. Warm-shelf sensor has been flickering yellow and returning green. No closure.”
“Maintenance check?”
“Scheduled this afternoon.”
Marco removed the final shelf from his route card.
“You still going?” she asked.
“Only to Seven. If the portable reads different from the fixed sensor, I turn at Five.”
She initialed the change. “Check-in at ten.”
The gallery held no sponsor team this time. Trail warden Talia Cross watched the main passage while Marco and an older mushroom collector worked opposite walls. Two fresh boot trails crossed a trampled fungus bed, and the dry shell of a mana beetle remained wedged above shoulder height.
The intact inner plate faced the wall.
Marco used the spear hook to bring the carcass down rather than climbing the shelf. One joint scale broke when it struck the floor. The main plate remained whole.
He had just packed it when scratching came from behind the lower bed.
A live beetle pushed through the skirt tissue, shell-first. Its front plates were already scored, likely by the delver who had killed the one above.
Marco gave ground to the open center of the gallery. The spear would work at that distance, but the wall behind the beetle offered a clean backstop and enough room to draw.
He chose the bow.
The first shot hit behind the head and drove through the soft joint. The arrow tip struck hidden stone beneath the fungus with a sharp crack.
The beetle folded.
Marco waited, listened, then approached with the spear ready only after Cross cleared the lower bed with her hooked staff. No second creature emerged.
The arrow was one of the new shafts.
Its tip had split against the stone, and the carbon behind the insert showed a gray compression ring. He tried the flex test once. Fibers whispered beneath his fingers.
Arrow Eighteen went into the broken-shaft sleeve.
Seventeen remained.
The dead beetle's scored front plate would sell only as filler. Its rear laminate and four joint scales were clean. While Cross guarded the passage, Marco field-packed them in three minutes, faster than his first attempt and still slower than a practiced delver who would have bothered. Precision cleaning waited for the licensed surface bay.
At Marker Five, his portable alarm agreed with the fixed sensor. Green. At Seven, the wall reading flickered near the top of its calibrated band and returned.
Marco did not continue to Nine.
He had removed it from the route before entering. A green reading did not put it back.
The nearer beds gave him enough work. He harvested skirts, damaged stems, and two clusters of brown shelf fungus that sold for drying powder. Beneath one bluecap stump, Salvage drew his attention to a soft secondary bulb connected to the root mat.
He exposed only the edge.
The bulb was healthy and attached. Removing it might kill the bed, and the public-harvest rules prohibited damage to productive roots.
Marco covered it again.
Usable did not mean legal. Potential value did not mean his.
He marked the observation for the station's ecology log.
When he moved his light, something gray shone in the loose soil beside the root mat.
It was smaller than a grain of rice and flat as mineral scale. Marco touched it with the blunt probe. Salvage responded with the faint certainty it normally reserved for a damaged edge that still held usable structure.
Material identified: System Residue — Unknown. Quantity: below standard measure.
No price appeared. No handling grade. No warning, use, or buyer class.
Marco photographed the fragment in place. It lay loose above the living root rather than attached to it, so he lifted it into a paper sample fold and wrote the route, marker, time, and bed condition across the seal. The whole package weighed less than the label.
At checkout, the attendant ran it beneath the counter scanner twice.
“Background precipitate,” she said. “System interfaces name trace junk when a recognition skill insists hard enough. Labs see variants in old sites.”
“Is it controlled?”
“No stable mana signature. No market category. You can surrender it for disposal or retain it under your loose-sample allowance.” She entered the identification into his harvest record. “It will make your bag worth exactly what it was worth before.”
Marco kept it.
He collected everything.
Near turnaround, he checked the spacing of the warm wall sections. The first began eleven paces beyond the gallery entrance. It ended after seven. The cold interval ran six. The next warm section ran seven again.
He shortened his stride and measured in boot lengths. The differences narrowed.
Marco marked each boundary in chalk and copied it to the route card.
The bluecap beds did not cover every warm section. Harvesting and foot traffic had erased some. But where intact beds remained, their centers fell at nearly identical positions within the warm bands.
He returned with twelve minutes to spare.
The second outing grossed one hundred seventy-three dollars. Direct costs were seventy-four. Ninety-nine remained before counting the arrows he had already purchased.
Together, outings four and five produced three hundred twenty-two dollars in receipts against one hundred forty-six in direct costs. One hundred seventy-six dollars left the dungeon with him.
The six-arrow purchase reduced the actual change in their household ledger to ninety-two.
Emma entered the number and drew a box around it.
“Positive again,” Lucy said, looking over her shoulder.
“By ninety-two,” Emma said.
“Still positive.”
Marco cleaned fungus residue from the surviving arrows at the sink. “I agree with Lucy's accounting method.”
“Lucy's accounting method is feeling.”
“It has low overhead.”
He spread both route cards beside the receipts. Chalk marks lined the margins: warm, cold, bed, bare stone, warm again. The paper fold containing the worthless gray fragment sat inside a labeled glass spice jar so nobody mistook it for dirt.
Sarah carried the plates to the sink, then stopped behind him.
“What are the little boxes?”
“Fungus beds.”
“And the lines?”
“Warm wall sections.”
Marco laid the first card over the second. Different route branches, different days. He had paced one section badly, and one bed had been trampled beyond measurement. The usable marks still lined up in repeated blocks.
At Ridgeway, the extra lobes on the crawler glands had matched. In Zone 1, mineral inclusions had sat at regular intervals. Dry Creek's warm seams could be ordinary dungeon structure shaped by old quarry cuts and mana flow.
Ordinary did not usually mean perfect.
He drew a straight edge through the centers of the beds.
The chalk marks formed a grid.