We went back to the search, taking solace that at least our Systems' auto-mapping function worked here. Well, it worked well enough—to a certain extent, this place seemed not to play entirely by Euclidian rules, but we could still read what our maps showed well enough to avoid searching where we'd already been, and successfully backtrack to paths we hadn't checked the first time when we needed to.
The more guarded shelves we found, though, the better hidden the rest seemed to be. It took us over a full day to find the last one, which meant we took an entire week in the 5th layer before finally reaching the 6th. None of us were hungry, especially not Chen Huan, but us three humans were starting to need drinking water pretty severely.
Fortunately, Shokoya had two gallons in his Inventory. "I wish I could say I thought this might happen," he said, "but it's actually just a holdover from that whole incident where I met Mian, and I just never bothered to remove them."
