Even with the nomads safely escaping into the desert Kairen knew his work wasn’t finished. While a good number of slaves had managed to make their way to freedom with the nomads or had risked the Sands by themselves far more were still inside Zaros, either locked away, fighting for their freedom, or dying slowly. Kairen’s heart went out to those who had given their lives, who had helped fight against the evil in the city even when they knew that they themselves would not benefit from the struggle. He couldn’t do anything for the dead though. The living slaves, though, had a chance to change things.

The few slaves actively involved in combat were the hardest to help. Not only did they have the most people watching them, there just wasn’t much that Kairen could do when it came to situations that required applications of raw power. Here and there his rat minions were able to provide critical distractions, but all too often the struggling slaves were outnumbered to the point that any help the desert rodents provided would simply be tossing their lives away for nothing. On top of that, Kairen knew that one of his main advantages was that Zar and his minions hadn’t realized that the rats were being coordinated by a human level intelligence, much less one that had the information gathering capabilities that came with being a ghost. The rats were smarter than an average rat by themselves, and had enough autonomy and internalized hatred of the slavers that most of their harassment today would simply be thought of as more of their usual behaviour.

That didn’t mean Kairen wasn’t willing to let the slaves know about his existence. Knowing that the spirit of the Oasis was present and was working to help the slaves escape was a significant source of hope for the slaves still kept in the common holding pens, and the chaos of combat gave Kairen the chances he needed to reveal the truth to the household slaves that lived in Zaros. Some of them were too beaten down, too conditioned to their roles to be trusted with his secrets, but more than one slave found themselves encountering an unusually intelligent rat, capable of weaving a path through the chaos, through hidden passages and shadowed alleys to safe havens that Kairen had spent months setting up. It pushed Kairen to the limits, flitting too and for as he worked to lead the slaves three or four at a time, yet he was unwilling to go any slower. It wouldn’t take long for some semblance of order to be restored and Kairen wanted as many slaves as possible to be safe from the inevitable retribution that would follow. Only once all the fighting had stopped and his latest group of escapees had almost gotten caught did Kairen allow himself to relax, falling into an unconscious slumber from the exertion he had put himself through.

For once Kairen was glad that no one could hear him. It would have been difficult to stay silent as he watched Zar’s minions slowly dig up the escape tunnel the slaves had used to get out of the holding cell. Kairen knew that there wasn’t going to be any way of hiding that the slaves had escaped and had chosen to implement a different strategy for covering his tracks.

“Sir!” One of the workers called out, grabbing Zar’s attention. The mercenary’s leg was still missing, but a brace allowed him to move around with some effort and standing imperiously nearby didn’t take much effort.

“The tunnel just ends, Sir. We’ve hit sand again.”

Before Kairen had formed his Oasis the entire area had been part of the shifting sands. While there was bedrock somewhere down there, it was deep, deep below the surface, reachable only with powerful magic. The Oasis had transmuted the surface level sand into solid dirt and stone when it formed, but had only done so for a few meters at most. Kairen had the ability to increase the thickness of his Oasis using his upgrade screen, but even then it would have taken centuries worth of growth before he would have connected his Oasis with the actual bedrock. Instead, the Oasis was an island of solid rock floating on a sea of sand as were all Oasis. So when the miners dug down and reached a layer of sand, their first thought was that they had simply reached the bottom edge of the oasis. Expanding their bottom section of the tunnel merely confirmed this suspicion, as they uncovered more and more sand. With no sign of any other tunneling Zar reluctantly called off the search.

Kairen winced as he worried over what this failure would mean for the few slaves who remained in captivity, before slowly sinking into the ground himself. He couldn’t see while surrounded by earth and stone, but he could feel the material he was passing through and could orient himself using his knowledge of the Oasis as a whole. down he went through stone and dirt before hitting the layer of sand that had stopped the miners, before continuing once more.

It didn’t take long for the gritty texture of sand to once more give way to solid rock, and Kairen kept on dropping until he arrived at the well-lit cavern he had created. The Oasis upgrade that made his controlled area deeper hadn’t had much value to Kairen when he had first started to build up the Oasis. Only once Mr. Mage had started performing his cruel rituals had Kairen found an interest in putting upgrade points in any option other than the one that Mr. Mage had been pushing for, and even then it had taken a few months before He was forced to make the Oasis land deeper. Unintentionally, holding off on purchasing a fundamental level upgrade had allowed Kairen to strengthen his willpower to a degree he hadn’t had for any of the other upgrades. While the System behind it all still did most of the heavy work of remaking the desert into solid ground, Kairen found that he had a small degree of guidance he could provide. At first it was only useful for preserving the tunnels that Alpha and his family had made, but the act of doing so had given the ghost ideas.

The rats were excellent diggers, but even they couldn’t compare to the sheer volume of area that Kairen could affect when he put his mind to it. He only had a few opportunities to do so, but a series of ever larger pockets of sand beneath the slave pens marked his progress in controlling the upgrade process. They weren’t the empty caves he wanted, but the sand left behind lacked a property that the rest of Kairen’s dirt had. It wasn’t immune to the cleansing property that kept the pool of water in the center of the Oasis clear no matter how much sand the wind or people deposited inside it. Constructing a small tunnel to the pond allowed for a steady flow of water to wash away the sand, even if it took some ingenuity to build it in such a way that the digging rats weren’t harmed by the sudden flow of water, and so that they could close it off once the caves had been cleared out. But once that was finished Kairen found himself with a large amount of real estate that no one knew about except for him. The rats took over one of the smaller caves, using it to stockpile their stolen wealth, but the other caverns held more than enough space to hide all the slaves. Figuring out a way to hide the escape tunnel took some more work, and Kairen was still worried that his ruse would eventually be discovered, but for now all the slaves that had been waiting to be auctioned off were safe underground, with enough food to last a few days, and with torchlight keeping their mood up as they slowly worked to acclimatize to their new environment.

It wasn’t a long-term solution. Even though the rats were masters at stealing just about anything that wasn’t nailed down and a few things that were, there simply weren’t enough of them to steal enough food to feed all of the slaves now hiding underground. Some of the tunnels were large enough for a human to fit through, so the people could feed themselves, but every time someone entered or left the hidden sanctuary was another chance for the whole thing to be found out. Instead, Kairen had plans for what would happen next, once the slaves had some time to adjust to being free and to recover their strength.

The more likely plan was simply leaving. The walls that had been built around Zaros had deep foundations, but the Oasis as a whole had grown since the walls were first built, and Kairen knew there were at least three tunnels large enough for slaves to slip through to take them out of Zaros, along with a dozen smaller ones the rats used to get around. Getting everyone out in one go would be difficult, but with the intention of leaving they could afford to more aggressively steal supplies. They would still need to survive crossing the sands, but with the proper equipment and not caring about their destination Kairen gave them pretty good odds of making it to safety. The downside was that other than the loss of slaves and supplies, it didn’t really set back Zar much. Zaros was making him a lot of money, and it wouldn’t be long before more slaves were filling his pens waiting to be sold to his buyers.

Kairen knew that he wasn’t to blame for the evil acts that Zar committed, that as long as he was doing what he could to make things right he was blameless in the matter. A year of watching people being broken into slaves had taught him lessons of patience he wished he hadn’t had to learn, but they gave Kairen the mental fortitude he needed to press on in the face of overwhelming evil. If the best option was to help his current rescuers escape and let Zar capture more slaves, then so be it. Kairen wasn’t going anywhere, and could figure out how to help any future slaves when he reached that moment in time. However, the nomads now knew about Zaros, and that gave the young ghost a chance. Until now Zar had been careful to only reveal the existence of Zaros to those clients of his who he knew wouldn’t object to its existence. Transporting armies across the Shifting Sands might be difficult, but sending a few high-level fighters to stomp out a small settlement was something that a good number of cities would do to help protect the villages in their area. Zaros was established enough now that any such attempt would be a much larger investment, but Kairen still held out hope that someone would throw their weight into attacking the city.

If the slaves hadn’t managed to leave by that point then their sudden attack from inside the fortified city, along with showing any outsiders the tunnels needed to bypass the walls would hopefully be enough to see the Oasis in friendlier hands. It was a long shot, but the preparations for it were much the same as simply planning to leave so Kairen simply held his thoughts to himself and waited to see what the future would hold.