Chapter 72: Sigil-Binders

  He decided to check out the middle passage quickly once he made it back up the three-way-fork outside the laboratory cavern. Just as he had suspected, it lead to a room with a door at the far end that blocked his progress. It was a circular room with a single pedestal at the center. All appearances pointed toward this being the way to the boss room, at least that’s what Obby was able to figure out once he was jacked into the Glyph-port inside the room.

  The giant circular door covered in pulsing glyphs was also a bit of a dead-giveaway.

  “Right hand passage it is then.” He quickly left without activating anything else and went towards the right-hand reflective passage instead.

  The next door slid open with a grating sigh of rock on rock, revealing a narrow corridor that pulsed with faint white light. He ducked under the threshold and stepped into a rectangular chamber.

  Two walls gleamed opposite each other. One carved from obsidian-black stone, veined with dormant runes. The other, across from it, shone like white crystal soaked in moonlight. On it pulsed a pattern of glowing glyphs, floating mid-surface like veins of molten gold suspended in water.

  Obby highlighted the Glyph-port since Alex was distracted the rooms visuals, and the sentient construct mentally dove into the hologram glyphs the moment he touched it, the port blinking once.

  “Ah. The Reflected-Pattern test. Classic mirrored glyphwork. You know this stuff. ”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “You copy the glyphs, perfectly mirrored. Carved into the empty wall by channeling your own aether, stroke by stroke. ”

  He stared at the display. The glyphs were looping through short, complex sequences of angled sigils and radial flares. A few bore the stylized sweep of command clusters, sigils that controlled other sigils.

  “I asked, what’s the catch, what if I mess up?”

  “The feedback loop punishes mistakes by rebounding miscast aether into your mind. A flashback of your own energy but reflected wrong. It mostly causes cognitive noise. Each mistake makes it harder to think clearly. ”

  He drew in a breath. “Perfect.”

  Approaching the blank wall, his fingers twitched, the glyph stylus appearing from his bracelet into his hand.

  Obby watched. “ You’ve done reverse mirroring before. On all of those aether crystal etchings. ”

  “Yeah, but that was on stable crystals, not live system-bound stone in a psychic dungeon. And that was with a spell ingrained in my mind by The System, not some new glyph sequence I’ve never seen before.”

  “Then consider this your practical exam. ”

  Alex raised his hand, letting his aether stir through the stylus. The chamber’s ambient energy curled inward, attracted by his intent. The glyph pattern across the room pulsed once, brighter, as if acknowledging that he had started.

  He began. His first stroke was clean. It was the same with the second.

  The aether at the end of his stylus tool glowed blue-white as he carefully traced the inverted direction of a sweeping arc glyph, its spiral had to curl counterclockwise here, even though the source wall spun clockwise.

  Reverse mirroring wasn’t just flipping symbols. Some glyphs were directional , others symmetrical. Some inversely attuned to the orientation of the glyph directly before it. One mistake and the system would feed him his own miscast energy like poison wine. His hand trembled only slightly.

  “Focus, ” Obby said. “ Ignore the light shift. It’s baiting you. They jitter the reflections every few seconds to throw off your rhythm. ”

  “I noticed,” he whispered to the room.

  Three glyphs down. Then four.

  The fifth was a twist-runed tri-form, with an anchor that required tracing its negative space and not the symbol itself. It was a rather tricky one. The mirrored illusion on his wall began to pulse red, warning him he’d hesitated too long.

  He grit his teeth and went for it. A notification blared.

  There was a flash of pain, white-hot energy lancing through Alex’s arm and into his mind like a livewire overloading. Not enough to harm him, but in his head images flickered. His own memories, twisted about in strange ways. He saw a classroom. A scream. Someone’s boots in blood.

  He blinked hard. “Damn it.”

  “First flashback always hits hard. Push through. ”

  “I’m fine.”

  Six glyphs down now. His thinking slowed, but his hands moved by instinct. Obby was right, he’d practiced this. Hours of hovering over aether crystals with the little pebble gremlin barking orders about proper anchor inversions and mirrored logic spirals.

  Seven glyphs down.

  He rotated his stylus to reverse-curl, a spike loop, then flicked upward for the punctuation glyph. Blue light surged down the traced channel like ink racing through paper veins, but it held. Eight glyphs down.

  The last glyph was simple: a single-point stabilizer. It shimmered on the reference wall like a closing eye. Alex inverted it in his mind and let the aether fly. The chamber went silent, he held his breath in his chest.

  The System chimed.

  The glowing wall winked out. A pulse of cool air brushed against his cheek. The opposite wall now blazed with perfect mirrored glyphs, his own work, locked in place. The far wall of the chamber rumbled down into the floor in acknowledgment to his work.

  Obby hummed, impressed. “ One mistake. That’s a record. According to the Glyph-port. ”

  “Almost scrambled my brain.”

  “But you didn’t. ” He tapped on the inside of Alex’s soul space. Alex wasn’t sure how he felt it, but he did. “ You’re doing great. Dad is very proud of you. ”

  Alex flexed his fingers. The ghost of the aether flashback still pulsed behind his eyes, but it was already fading. He didn’t say anything in response. They passed through the open archway into the silence beyond.

  Another puzzle conquered. Another piece of the dungeon yielding to him.

  ***

  The next door hissed open revealing a vast, circular chamber bathed in twilight-blue light. The ceiling soared high above like the inside of a domed cathedral, and along it spun a slow carousel of glowing sigils. Firebrands of aetheric script that looped and re-formed in endless complexity.

  The ceiling’s glyphs made his head swim, the floor was worse.

  Hundreds of square tiles stretched to the far wall, each faintly reflective and obsidian-black. Some shimmered, but most didn’t. Every ten seconds, there was a low grinding ka-chunk , and the glowing reflections rippled outward across the tiles in a new pattern like a stone dropped in a still pond made of glyphscript and madness.

  He stepped to the edge of the entry platform, eyes narrowing. Across the chamber, a matching stone dais stood waiting. An arched doorway pulsed on the far wall, locked behind shimmering red light. That was the way forward, of course.

  He activated the port.

  “Obby, you see this, right?”

  “Yes. Shifting labyrinth puzzle. The ceiling displays a glyph array. The floor mirrors it but scrambled. The correct path is where the reverse of the ceiling’s active glyphs are projected. This is like the previous room, but cranked up a notch. ”

  “So only the floor tiles that reflect the inverted glyphs overhead are safe?”

  Obby gave a mental nod. “ Exactly. But be careful here, every ten seconds the array shifts, and stepping on the wrong tile increases local gravitational compression. ”

  “How much gravity are we talking?”

  “The first couple times will suck, but won’t hurt too bad. It increases each time though, so eventually it’s enough to turn your bones into paste if you go slow or sloppy. ”

  He rolled his shoulders and exhaled. “You give me the best news in every one of these rooms Obby.”

  He stared at the glyphs rotating across the dome. There were four central clusters, spiraling out from a fixed axis. Each set burned with radiant intensity before fading into the next. His brain itched as he watched. The symbols weren’t simple, just like the last room there were tricky ones sprinkled about in the arrays.

  He crouched, tapping the nearest floor tile. It felt cold, smooth, the surface just slightly reflective. Ten feet ahead, one square shimmered faintly with a blue reverse-glyph, the inverted echo of the ceiling’s active array.

  “That one,” he whispered. “That one is safe.”

  Obby said nothing. This was Alex’s test now.

  Ka-chunk.

  The ceiling flickered and the glyph array shifted. Alex moved, taking three quick steps, diagonally forward and left. The moment his foot left the prior tile, it darkened. Where he’d just stood, the sigil now read wrong, already shifted. He moved again, right, then forward, and then left.

  Each decision was a calculation, matching the present ceiling glyph to its mirrored tile on the floor, reading not just the symbols but their rotations, reversals, and minor dialectic slants. What made it extra tough was that the glyphs weren’t static. Some twisted in motion, requiring him to make glyph translations on the fly. He made it a third of the way through.

  Ka-chunk.

  He was too slow. The gravity hit like a hammer.

  Alex staggered as the weight pressed down, it wasn’t enough to break bone, but enough to feel like someone had piled a hundred pounds across his shoulders. His joints ached instantly and his knees wobbled.

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  “Move, ” Obby said from inside his mind. “ Don’t hesitate now. The pressure will just increase on the next mistake. ”

  He grit his teeth and kept moving. Every shift now came with a countdown in his head. His breathing grew ragged as he advanced, each safe tile harder to spot. The floor shimmered with a hundred false glyphs, some just one angular stroke off, t rick tiles inciting him to make a mistake .

  Halfway through his shoulders tensed. The next correct tile was four spaces away. No straight line took him to it. He was forced to try vaulting diagonally to hit a safe glyph. He landed with a grunt and turned.

  Ka-chunk.

  Another shift occurred right as he made another step, then he missed. The tile beneath his boot glowed red, t he gravity spike hitting like a mountain. He dropped to one knee, gasping as the floor tried to turn him into a smear of regret and blood. His skin felt like it was being pulled from his bones, a burst of blood trickling from his nose.

  “A third spike will crush your ribs, ” Obby warned. “ Get up. Read faster. ”

  Alex dragged himself upright, his vision swimming around him. The ceiling blurred but the glyphs still pulsed. He narrowed his gaze. Three clusters and Five-link rotations. One mirror offset.

  “Got you, ” he grinned.

  He moved two steps, a third, then a jump. He was getting close, less than twenty tiles left to the end of the labyrinthine horror. But the shifting speed of the glyph above him was increasing. The puzzle didn’t only punish his mistakes, it learned to fight against him.

  His legs were heavy as iron rods. Every breath now tasted like copper.

  Ka-chunk.

  Glyphs shifted again. This time he moved before thinking, acting on muscle memory and instinct. He landed on a tile and it flashed green, safe. Five tiles diagonally, then three across. He was on the last stretch, the gravity was crushing down now, not from his mistakes, but from cumulative exposure. The room was seeing if he’d break under pressure.

  He didn’t break.

  The final tile glowed beneath his foot like a revealed blessing. The pressure lifted. The air lightened. The ceiling’s glyphs froze in place. A final chime echoed through the room.

  The arch on the far side dissolved its red shimmer, leaving only a dark passage and the promise of harder puzzles ahead. Alex stumbled forward, wiping the blood from under his nose, grinning through the ache in his legs.

  “I’m gonna need a long nap after this floor,” he groaned.

  “Better make it a coma, ” Obby added.

  They passed through the arch, leaving the shifting floor behind them. One more room was now beaten.

  One step closer to his freedom from this dark hell.

  ***

  The next room appeared to Alex like it was some sort of music hall. Symbols swam like notes on sheet music. A central podium held an aether crystal the size of his head and was etched with a complicated enchantment.

  Obby’s reading of the glyph-port told him he had to etch a smaller egg like aether crystal to compliment the big one. Like tuning a fork to harmonize with another. In the meantime, the entire room filled with a mist that pulled on his aether and drew it out of his body, making him weaker and weaker over the minutes he spent etching the crystal. Alex probably was particularly screwed over by this test due to his body needing aether to keep functioning. It was a hell of a time.

  He nearly passed out before he managed to complete the puzzle.

  The next room was actually tied to [Alchemy], confirming Obby’s insistence that it was a sister skill for [Glyphcraft].

  He was forced into some weird logic puzzle, adding ingredients to vials in specific amounts and cooking them at demanding times and temperatures. After a couple minutes into the test, he was getting the paranoid feeling the police would break in and arrest him for cooking up some illicit substances. The feeling passed quickly.

  In the end, Alex had to drink his concoctions and stand in a strange enchanted circle. It didn’t take Obby’s overly-sarcastic-warning for him to know that fucking up the potion creation would mean disfigurement, or death.

  He sort of preferred the later over the former.

  Each of the rooms gave him the typical notification and a thousand dungeon points for the completed room. Alex saw each one as another step towards helping his friends get the power they need.

  With all the rooms done except the middle tunnel, which Alex was certain led to a boss of some kind, he got a new system notification that he didn’t expect.

  “Okay, I’m not complaining here,” he swiped away the message and began the long walk back through the puzzle rooms. “But did I just get rewarded on top of the other rewards? Isn’t that against the great Heavenly System’s way of being… well a dick?”

  “You’d think so given your life here so far, but usually The System is pretty good at giving rewards. Its known for being fair. The harder something is, the better the rewards. The more effort put in, and so on. ”

  “Doesn’t feel like it.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t. You are in a strange and unique predicament as an accidental Worldstrider. An entity that The System isn’t sure what to do with. It’s testing you… in more ways than one.”

  “ Always happy to be the lab rat,” Alex said it as a joke, because he sure as hell didn’t mean it. He was brought into a strange ass magic game world, told to “get gud” or die, and has been messed with pretty much every damn step of the way.

  It was nerve wracking, stressful beyond belief. His friends were in constant danger, sometimes because of his own stupid mistakes. He had a sword dangling over his head every second of the day. He fucking hated it.

  And he never felt more alive.

  Aether, spells, stats, experience points, it was something Alex understood. Simple concise, not dramatic or complicated by people or social networks.

  Or little twin brothers.

  “Let’s go, we have boss rooms to explore.”

  It was a minute later that Alex almost missed the door.

  He noticed it recessed into the side of the narrow hallway leading toward the middle room at the three-way fork. Shrouded by thick shadows and half-choked with dust that hadn’t been disturbed in what felt like centuries, he merely caught its shape in the corner of his eye as he passed. There was no marker, no glowing sigils, just a smooth arch of black stone and the faintest indentation of a long-forgotten archway.

  He hesitated, hand brushing the stone. It was warm to the touch.

  “Obby,” he said “Got something.”

  “Well, open it then meatboy, ” Obby giggled in his head.

  The door sighed open at the touch of Alex’s aether. The chamber beyond was silent. Not threatening. Not dangerous. Just… old.

  It was circular, maybe thirty feet across. Its walls were lined in slate and aether crystal. There weren’t any obvious traps, no pulsating threat, or screaming alarms. In the center sat a raised dais carved in the shape of an open palm, within which sat the largest glyph-port terminal Alex had seen yet. I ts etched socket glowed dimly with azure-blue light.

  He stepped toward it slowly, reverently. The moment his hand brushed the port, Obby surged forward , riding the surge of Alex’s aether and pouring into the interface, the room reacted.

  There was no hologram panel. Instead, the entire room came to life.

  Glyphs ignited along the curved ceiling, lines of luminous code snaking out like ivy from the terminal. The walls themselves projected their contents. Words, fragments, visuals, and more flickered like an afterimage across every surface.

  Obby hissed softly. “ This is a much more advanced port. I’m still limited, but I can access more than before. This place is a knowledge depository for the ones who made the facility. ”

  “The Sigil-Binders?” Alex asked, eyes scanning the glowing script.

  “Yes. ” Obby paused, parsing the data. “ This room… was a record-archive. A place to log theoretical progress and civil actions. ”

  He frowned. “Civil actions?”

  Obby didn’t respond for a beat. Then the wall shimmered, and an image flickered to life. It was a lab , clean and minimalist, glowing lines inscribed across walls and floors like a sanctum of geometry. A figure stood in the middle, robed in deep emerald and black, hood drawn.

  Then came a voice. The voice was calm, precise.

  [Log Entry 5537. High Archivist Elen Tashir. Internal Designation: Intent Layering Project. Phase Four. Binding Progress: 76%.]

  “Elen was one of the lead architects of the Order, ” Obby said. “ She and her cohort were... ambitious. They weren’t just trying to construct glyphs. They were attempting to bypass the normal spellcasting and talk directly to The System. In their dream project, glyphs would encompass everything. ”

  Alex tilted his head. “How?”

  “By creating glyph constructs that encoded intent itself. ”

  The image changed. Glyph matrices exploded across the walls, diagrams of nested runes, some with looping recursion, others like song sheets folded through dimensions. That was just the depths of things that Alex was able to understand. There were other layers beyond that, like a book made of transparent pages, lines and glyphs stacked on top of each other adding new meaning to the pages before and complimented by the pages after.

  His stomach twisted just looking at it. “That sounds dangerous.”

  “It was. ” Obby pulsed low. “ Because it began to work. ”

  Another flicker, a second image, this time it was darker. The same lab was now cracked and broken. Two figures were arguing in the center, their voices raised, glyphs sparking wildly in the air. One wore the emerald robes of before. The other, crimson-lined black marked them as part of a different faction.

  [“The System will not tolerate tampering!”

  “Then let it break us! We understand it now—we can guide it, shape it, make it something more than cold law and endless combat!”]

  Obby’s paused the feed. “ This was the fracture. The ideological split. ”

  Alex starred at the image, breath caught in his chest.

  “One group wanted to continue, to evolve magic through [Glyphcraft], and turn it from tool to language. But the other believed it would provoke a reaction. That tampering with The System’s work would bring… consequences. ”

  “Did it?” Alex asked.

  The image changed again. Burning halls. Shattered stone. A collapsed spire of glyphs frozen in the moment of its unweaving like a spell unraveling mid-cast. A smoking crater.

  “Something happened, ” Obby said. “ Some backlash. Whether from within The System… or something else, I can’t tell. The glyphs of their society stopped functioning. From there the records break off. The surviving faction sealed the knowledge away. ”

  “Sealed where? Here?” He said, looking around.

  Obby mentally nodded. “ This floor. This dungeon. It's a test-bed and a tomb both. ”

  Alex finally took a step back, letting his fingers fall away from the glyph-port. The walls dimmed, the last image of Elen Tashir fading like the echo of a candle's breath.

  “So,” he started to piece things together. “They tried to write glyphs themselves into magic, into The System. And so the world punished them for it?”

  Obby paused in thought. “ Or maybe... the world wasn’t ready for it. ”

  Alex exhaled through his nose, a slow breath full of weight. These Sigil-binders were passionate to the point of insanity, but they were also geniuses. He didn’t know if he admired them or feared them. Regardless, one thing was certain, he was walking through the remnants of their civilization.

  It was a reconstruction of their order under the purview of The System itself. Alex didn’t know if this was a twisted version of their true history, one that was rewritten by the Heavenly System’s perspective. Was The System crafting a tale of a mad Order of people as a warning for others, or was this something else.

  “So is this the real lab to this order, or just a fake one?” Alex looked around. “Dungeon’s aren’t necessarily real right? This isn’t the actual place, the real story, just what The System wants to show us?

  ? “It’s impossible to know for certain, ” Obby sounded unsure himself. “ This could literally be a transplant of the testing grounds of this Order, or just a recreation. Maybe even a mix of both. How would we know the difference? ”

  “So this Order of Sigil-Binders can still be around, somewhere? Or they could be dead now for centuries…” He knew he wasn’t going to get a straight answer and that sticking around in the room wouldn’t bring him any closer to the exit, or to his friends.

  Alex left the hidden room, back to the dungeon and its puzzles.

  And somewhere in these halls, The System was still watching.