Hades did not resemble a prison or a battlefield.
The road beyond the gate entered a walled district built around broad courts, narrow markets, and buildings marked with bronze tablets. Dead adventurers moved between them in afterlife forms. Some carried quest records. Others compared equipment near training yards or waited beneath signs identifying different judgments and services.
Clocks appeared beside many of them. A visitor with less than a minute remaining sat on a stone bench and finished writing a message in his system record. His form vanished when the clock reached zero. No one nearby treated the disappearance as a death.
His consciousness had returned to the restored body waiting in Sanctuary's hospital.
The Five Knots drew more attention.
