When I was ready, I went down the second corridor on the left. This one led to a relatively small, circular chamber with five evenly spaced doors opposite the way I'd entered.
[Trial of Insight]
[All but one path leads to dead ends. Incorrect paths also contain deadly traps. If you choose an incorrect path but survive, the correct path will be closed to you and you will fail the trial.]
[First, find the odd one out.]
This time, there was no apparent time limit. A good thing too, because at first glance, the Sanctuary's instruction to "find the odd one out" seemed hopeless. The five doors looked identical in every way, no matter how hard I stared at them. Each had a look of intricately carved stone, and the carving itself was quite complex, so if there really was a minor difference in one design, it could take hours to find it. Unlike the doors leading to the start of the trials I'd opened so far, they weren't designed to just push open either. Instead, each one had a button slightly to its right.
An idea finally came to me after a long time of fruitless staring. I was leaning against one of the doors to rest, idly thinking that while it may look like stone, it had the same unnaturally smooth feel of a stronger synthetic material that it shared with all the rest of the Sanctuary.
"You know what would be an incredibly dick move?" I said to myself, "If the difference wasn't even IN the carving, but one of the doors was actually made of stone, or an otherwise more natural material, and that was how it's the 'odd one out'."
A moment later, I realized what I just said and moved to check all the doors by touch. Sure enough, the second door from the right clearly felt different. It was slightly rougher, and the edges of the grooves in the intricate carving were sharper. The most telltale sign though was how different the inside of the grooves felt.
I held my breath, and pushed the button to open that door. I could see that it led into another round chamber of equal size just a short distance away. I entered, and the way I came slammed shut behind me. It was only then that I realized that there didn't seem to be any doors in this one.
Oh crap, did I screw it up somehow? My eyes darted this way and that, as I got on guard for any death traps to activate.
However, none did, and a new notification appeared:
[For your second task, find the unnatural spot. Press on it to open the hidden way.]
After pondering that for a moment, I finally spotted that the walls in this room were quite different from the previous room and indeed the rest of the Sanctuary. Instead of being mostly contiguous, as was mostly the case elsewhere, here there was a great number of bricks of "stone," all highly variable in size. Too, quite a few of them were sticking out of the wall, some a little some a lot.
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"So, I need to push the right one in," I muttered, "I'm guessing the wrong ones activate death traps, and might even disqualify me from this trial. There was a trick to it last time, there'll be a trick to it this time..."
But the trick wasn't readily evident. After a while, it was clear that it wasn't going to come down to a difference of material this time. As far as I could tell it was all "unnatural," so that couldn't be what the message had meant.
"Tch, I've been at this so long my hands are getting cold...wait, what?"
I'd been feeling around the walls of the room for quite some time by this point, and for the most part they'd had a rather pleasant warming effect. My hands shouldn't have been able to be so cold. I experimented around, and discovered in a particular section—if I treated the way I'd come in as south, the section in question was a little south of due west—was cooler than the rest.
I felt around that section, and found that in a certain direction it got colder still. I kept feeling around, as though I was playing an inverted game of warmer/colder.
I stopped at a single protruding brick, near to the top of the wall, that was almost like ice to the touch. I pushed it in, and it clicked and stopped moving in when it was halfway level with the wall. A moment after the click, I heard a welcome grating noise as the wall directly across from the entrance to the chamber slid up to reveal a new passage.
The third chamber was much larger than the previous two. Other than the way I'd come, I counted a whopping twenty-four other doors. They were all shut, with no apparent way to open any of them.
[Good work getting this far. For your final challenge in this trial, seek the only place of safety. At its end, you will find the switch. But be warned: This time, choosing wrong will result in a plunge into the magma sea.]
The moment the notification vanished, all the doors surrounding me opened—and through them, strange hovering metallic sentries, each of roughly human size, began pouring in by the dozen. Far from being driven to panic, I smiled.
"Heh, I think I know the trick to this one already."
The eight doors closest to where I'd entered on the right had been in my field of vision at the start, and I'd seen sentries come through all of them, so I dismissed those. I started fighting them off, making sure to keep an eye on doors I hadn't checked. When a new enemy appeared through one of them, I stopped keeping track of that door.
It was surprisingly easy to multitask this way. The sentries, identified by my
I got slightly unlucky this time. I'd examined more than half the doors before I found one, four doors left from the far side of the room, that didn't seem to be spitting out more sentries. Figuring I couldn't be too careful, I checked the rest of the doors to make certain that they were. As I'd suspected, every door but that one was letting more sentries into the room whenever I destroyed some.
I made my way inside that door. Like the other doorways, it was pitch black inside. At least, until I was properly inside. Then a series of lights turned on—revealing a lever identical to the one in the last, unfortunately extremely memorable trial at the end of a long hallway. Trying to add a slight sense of ceremony, I rubbed my hands together a bit, then pulled it.
[Trial of Insight: PASS]
By the time I looked away from the notification, I found myself already back in the central chamber.