Chapter 70: Puzzles

  Alex sat cross-legged on the stone floor, spine straight, hands resting on his knees. The enchanted tools were tucked away, the Glyphcrafting ritual etched and complete, his Aether Gate humming softly behind his neck like a well-oiled valve waiting to turn.

  He reached into his bracelet and pulled out the Vital Essence Fragment . It throbbed faintly in his palm like a blackened heart, dark violet veins of energy twisting and swirling within its crystal surface. It wasn’t warm, but it gave off a presence, something ancient and heavy, like a deep note humming just below human hearing.

  “ Alright, ” he whispered. “ Let’s see what you’ve got. ”

  He brought the fragment to his chest and pressed it against his sternum. Not hard at all, just enough for contact. Then, he closed his eyes and activated his aether gathering technique , letting his newly inscribed [Lattice Spiral] enchantment hum to life at the base of his neck.

  Immediately, he felt it.

  A needlepoint spark in his soul. A trickle of dense, heavy energy slipping into his body. Not a flood, not yet, but like a finger tapping water from a pressurized tank. It was cold and sharp. The dark-aligned aether wasn’t malicious, but it wasn’t kind either. It didn’t feel like it wanted to be controlled. It had to be commanded . His breath hitched and a shiver ran up his spine.

  Keep your rhythm. Keep your pull steady, he reminded himself. Don’t choke on it.

  He breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. He felt the item against his chest react and he let it. He let the fragment pulse and match the flow of his aether gathering technique. Each time his lungs filled with breath, more of the energy slipped into his body. Like a slow infusion—drop by drop—into his tissues , where it began to churn and settle.

  In the back of his mind, he felt a change stir somewhere inside himself.

  After about an hour, Alex slowly opened his eyes. A sheen of sweat had collected on his back once again, and his limbs felt… not tired , exactly, but pressurized . Like his body was still adjusting to what it had taken in.

  He glanced at the fragment. It was still whole, still pulsing.

  One down. About a hundred more to go.

  “Not bad for your first taste of dungeon-grade essence, ” Obby said, his voice echoing faintly from the bracelet. “ You didn’t explode or pass out. That’s good. ”

  Alex wiped his face with his sleeve. “Wasn’t expecting it to be so... concentrated. It’s like snorting freezing cold stamina potion.”

  Obby pulsed a soft blue. “ That sounds about right for dark attuned essence. Be careful, mages can get addicted to these fragments. Like magical ADHD pills, only they make you moodier. ”

  “Sounds like a fun time.” He stood, joints popping slightly, and stretched.

  The lab chamber around them remained dimly lit, silent, thick with the sterile scent of stone and ancient alchemy but now mixed with sweat. The tables were cleared, his tools returned to his bracelet storage. There was no more prepping, no more ritual steps. The groundwork was laid. Now came the next question.

  He turned toward the three tunnels at the far end of the room. All of them opened like yawning mouths carved into the rock. Each one was subtly different.

  The leftmost tunnel sloped downward in a narrow spiral, lit with green bioluminescent moss clinging to the walls. Alex could only see about ten feet in before the tunnel curved out of his sight.

  The middle one was wide, almost too perfectly round. The air near its mouth shimmered slightly, like heat haze or a mirage. He could barely see a chamber at the end a few dozen feet away, something stood in its center, a pedestal of some sort.

  The rightmost was formed of smooth walls, uneven, and dark. The surfaces seemed to be slightly reflective, just a tiny bit of the moss from the left tunnel dancing along the jagged angles. There was no light to be seen deeper inside. Only dark silence.

  “Three options,” he said, hands on his hips. “What do you think?”

  Obby buzzed thoughtfully. “ The left one’s got bio-alchemical moss. Could mean earth themed or natural traps. Might be a puzzle tunnel or a nature trial. ”

  “And the others?”

  “Middle might be the way forward, something we have to do last? The right side will probably have something to do light, or reflections?

  Alex ran a hand through his hair. “So: Earth puzzle, boss room, or mirrors?”

  “Pick your poison, ” Obby said. “ Or your hallucination. Or your face-eater. ”

  He stared down each tunnel once more. Which path do I take first? Which one is a test... and which one is a trap? Are all of them traps? He cracked his knuckles, then grinned. “Let’s flip a coin.”

  “Right, because your luck has been amazing so far.”

  “ That’s a fair point.”

  Alex slumped slightly and sighed. “What would Adam do?” He said wryly. “No hesitation, no show of fear. Just action, confidence. So then… the left!”

  He turned and began walking down the left hand tunnel, taking the spiral stairs before he could let himself change his mind. The left tunnel didn’t appear dangerous from first glance, so he decided to trust his instincts. Surely the first room was decently safe, right?

  The corridor narrowed, the archway tightening until Alex had to duck slightly to pass down the steps.

  As the stairs ended and he stepped into the chamber beyond, the air changed. He felt it happen, becoming denser, like wading into a shallow pool. The second floor’s ambiance, silent and intellectual, now throbbed with quiet urgency. As if the room itself was holding its breath in anticipation.

  Then, the door sealed behind him with a clunk of finality.

  “Fuck, that’s never good.”

  The room was square with a high ceiling, though the ceiling itself was a lattice of interlocking stone plates. Odd, he thought. It looked almost like it could move . The floor, by contrast, was a smooth granite surface marked with dozens of interwoven glyphs. Some were glowing faintly, others flickering, and several dark and broken like shattered glass.

  On the far wall, a similar massive glyph was half-etched into stone. Dozens of interlocking lines, runic swirls, and angular branches formed the frame of an enormous circular sigil. It was beautiful.

  And incomplete.

  “Glyph port, over there.” Alex followed the highlighted indicator to another marble pedestal, it took only a touch and brief pulse of his aether before Obby was once again swimming in a hologram of glyphs.

  “Okay then. Welcome to Puzzle Chamber One, ” Obby announced. “ Oh, this one’s interesting. It’s like Sudoku, if it could explode. ”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Alex took a cautious step backward. “How explode-y are we talking?”

  The light in the room shifted. The moss itself twisting and writhing erratically, the sections and panels of stone above him beginning to slide open. From the ceiling, a translucent sphere of crystal slid downward on a track of ethereal light. Inside, a dense core of blue-white aether pulsed. Beneath the crystal: a carved glyph pedestal with a glowing countdown timer.

  [ 300 Seconds ]

  [ 299 Seconds ]

  The indicator wasn’t in English, but Alex could still read it. That didn’t give him any sense of relief though.

  His jaw tightened. “Okay. That’s pretty fucking explode-y.”

  “Don’t worry, ” Obby chirped. “ Only a ten-meter radius. Unfortunately, you’re inside that radius. ”

  “I’m less worried already.”

  He turned back toward the massive glyph on the wall, studying it more closely now. Its shape reminded him of a classic earthly-containment structure. There was a central core, surrounded by three radial aether spokes, each of which branched off into smaller sub-runes.

  He spotted the damage immediately. Several segments were missing, like broken teeth in an otherwise perfect mechanical gear. Other lines flickered between clarity and corruption, unstable, bent and malformed. Below the glyph, a floating panel buzzed into life with five square stone tiles. Each tile held a faintly glowing sigil, all of them unlabeled.

  “Let me guess,” Alex muttered. “Put the right glyphs in the right places or we go kaboom.”

  “Smart boy, ” Obby said. “ But here’s the fun part, it’s not a static puzzle. The room is responding to your choices and your mistakes . Every time you try to fix it, the puzzle adapts to you. ”

  Alex grimaced. “Adaptive glyph puzzles? Bastards.”

  He knelt before the wall and ran his fingers across the grooves. The aether responded to his touch. It flared up as his own aether resonated through his hand. Three empty sockets glowed dimly.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “Lets hurry up and get this thing solved, time is ticking down.”

  Alex exhaled, reached for the tile etched with the sigil of “Balance” and slotted it into the left socket. The glyph flared softly, steady and even. Next, he chose “Resonance” for the core socket. It aligned well with the radial spokes, matching the pulse pattern of the aether crystal above. He slid it into place.

  Third was a gamble. He picked “Flux,” a more chaotic glyph, for the right socket. It looked like it belonged as it was more sharp, kinetic. The moment the tile clicked into place, the glyph flared green.

  He let out a sigh, and pumped his fist. He was celebrating to soon though as the puzzle’s glyph suddenly changed and grew. A new layer of lines and symbols appeared, the number of sockets growing. There were five now, not three.

  “Okay, the core is the same,” Alex talked himself through the puzzle. His slotted the ‘Resonance’ tablet once again. “Then… ‘Connection’, for that outer socket.” He moved one of the tablets into place, the lines appearing to sync well. But once he put in the entire glyph flared red.

  “Oh no.”

  The glowing countdown jumped from [263 Seconds] to [200 Seconds]. The entire ceiling let out a rumble , then the charging crystal began to glow brighter.

  “Oh, COME ON!” He shouted.

  “ You triggered the adaptive lock. It punishes mistakes with time compression and increased complexity. You know... like a loving parent. ”

  More glyphs began to swirl into existence around the original structure, old sockets vanishing and new sockets appearing in different locations. There were still five though. Alex swore under his breath and grabbed the tiles again. He scanned the pattern. The radial aether pattern was shifting every few seconds, realigning its flow. It was like trying to thread a moving needle.

  He needed to be smarter, he needed to be faster.

  “Okay... The outer layer is a containment, holding the oscillation inside.” Alex nodded to himself. He placed the “Resonance” tile again, this time on the very top socket. A green flash, correct. Next was “Containment” to the bottom left. “Continuity” slotted on the lower right. Three greens.

  He reached for the fourth, “ Mind ” , maybe? He hesitated.

  The ceiling groaned again, the crystal flashed brightly and then dimmed just a bit. His heart pounded as dust spilled down from the ceiling above. He wiped his palms on his pants, then slammed the tile into place.

  Red flash.

  “Shit! Okay. Okay. I can do this.”

  More lines spread around the glyph. Now there were seven sockets. The glyph had grown enormous, forming near-holographic lattice rings that hovered above the wall, spinning slowly. The ceiling was now awash in the bright glow of the enchanted crystal bomb at its center.

  He took a breath.

  “Okay, Alex. Think like a mage. Think like a glyph. What are you trying to say here?”

  The central glyph structure was clearly a sentence. That much was obvious now. The core was a subject: “Resonance.” The arms were modifiers: “Connection”, “Containment,” “Balance,” “Continuity.” The last two, he needed contextual closures. He grabbed “Focus” and “Anchor.” Two lesser-used glyphs. He slotted both of them.

  One green. One red.

  The ceiling let out a long groan , louder now.

  [42 Seconds]->[30 Seconds]

  “Focus was wrong,” he muttered. “Too narrow. This isn’t a control circuit, it’s an expression node. The Sigil-binders weren’t trying to suppress energy, they were channeling it.”

  He scanned the options again and his eyes locked onto a tile that hadn’t noticed before.

  It was a faintly glowing, inverted glyph: “ Release”.

  Alex smirked. He thought of a raccoon back on earth, stuck in a trap and holding a snack in a greedy little paw. “Of course. You can’t contain what you haven’t released into your container.”

  He replaced the “Focus” tablet with “Release.”

  All seven glyphs flashed green. The circuit glowed to full power.

  The core crystal retracted back into the ceiling with a fading hum. The door behind him unlocked with a hiss of air pressure. In front of him, a new doorway appeared as a section of the wall slid sideways. He dropped to his knees, letting out a long, ragged breath.

  “That,” he said, chest heaving, “was awful . ”

  “That, ” Obby said smugly, “ was amazing. According to the records I read, you figured out the syntax and the expression node faster than 94% of test subjects. ”

  “You knew the answer the whole time?” He felt a bit of anger bubble in his stomach.

  “No,” The sentient pebble’s voice was mocking again. “ I could read the results and scores of the other test subjects, that’s all. I wasn’t given an answer key.”

  The anger quickly faded inside him and he nodded. That made sense. You can be told the passing rate of a test without knowing the answers to the test itself. That’s assuming Obby wasn’t lying, something that he, even now, still wasn’t sure of at all.

  “Wait, were those test subjects people? Or were they like, the Kobolds and other sentient monsters?”

  “Mostly they were people. Some sentient slugs. One guy who was technically a jar of smoke. ”

  “You’re fucking with me aren’t you?”

  “Yes, yes I am. ”

  He chuckled despite himself. He stood, cracking his back and stretching his sore limbs. “I swear, if the next room has a countdown timer and a spike pit—”

  “Oh, I hope it has a spike pit, ” Obby said cheerfully. “ Would really spice things up. ”

  Alex shot a glare at his bracelet where Obby’s rock resided and stepped through the now-open doorway into the next corridor.

  Only five more puzzles to go.