'Let's see... After this right turn, the nearest blue room from the map should be right in front of me. Good lord, this place is so nerve-racking...' Soren to himself, as he held his breath and waited for humanoid creature to pass by him, before letting out a sigh of relief and swiftly making his way towards the room in question. Once he entered it, he let his body slowly collapse on the nearest wall with the biggest sigh of relief he could muster, before deciding to check on his status menu once more, in the hope that something might have changed.

5cT@02nd /39nM1[]m Inventory 0U351# 81M9a2b-,1*n /cmd_emrg_prtcl

"Most of my menu is unusable, but why is the inventory tab looking normal once more?" Soren wondered, as he tried opening it and managed to open his inventory tab. Once he did so, he tried looking for his sword or any of his game items, but there was nothing inside the inventory, aside from an item named "???". Seeing as it was the only item, Soren took the mysterious item from the inventory and once it materialized in the real world, the mysterious item was a weightless statue of the same tentacle creature from the previous room.

'What a weird and creepy statue... I don't I ever had this in my own inventory. Just what is going on anymore?' Soren thought to himself, while examining the statue and his empty inventory, before setting it down on the ground. The moment it was set down on the ground, the entire room got engulfed with a bright light and transformed into the same room as the previous once he had visited before, albeit without the warm feeling it provided and the basin at the bottom of the statue. Seeing as the room turned into the same as the previous room, Soren immediately checked on the side of the statue and found a similar-looking indent as before with a similar handle as well and pulled it, just like before. Doing so, caused the statue to emit some sort of hologram, displaying three pillars with one of those pillars having four disks at the bottom, with the top disk being the smallest and the bottom disk being the largest. Through a bit of examination, he figured out that by touching one of the holographic disks, he would be able to transfer it to one of the other pillars, but he would only be able to pick up the topmost disk.

Once he found that out, it barely took him a minute to move all of the disk from the leftmost pillar to the rightmost one, since the pillar and disks were just a copy of the tower of hanoi game he used to play with some of his old friends from the orphanage. After Soren put the last disk on pillar, most the hologram dissipated, while one of the disks materialized into a physical stone disk, which Soren immediately caught, as he saw it materialize in front of him. When the disk finished materializing and fell on his hands, Soren gave it a quick examination, but found nothing of interest, since it was nothing more than a black stone disk with a circular hole in the middle. Once he finished its examination, Soren put the disk into his inventory once more and doing so, he made to sure to open and close it several times, to make sure it work properly, before turning his attention back to the statue, which was displaying the previous map on the wall, albeit without a few slight differences.

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"So one of the blue rooms turned green, which is obviously the room I'm currently in. But why did the corners disappear from the map? They were useless, since there was nothing there and no paths required me to go through the corners of the maze, but still..." Soren stated, before planning his route for the next blue room, while making sure that his path didn't require him to go through the edges of the maze. The sludgy humanoid creatures were still a common occurrence, but by this point, Soren was completely used by their presence and could even start walking down walks confidently, so long as he walked slow and silently. Granted, there were times where he made noise, which caused him to hide or even run at points, but the creatures never managed to come even close to his jogging speed, let along his running sprint.

After an undetermined amount of time, Soren managed to arrive at another room, which was marked with the blue color on the map and upon entering, Soren first decided to check on his menu for any potential changes, but aside from his inventory, nothing else seemed to work. With the menu checked, Soren moved to his inventory next, but aside from the disk, there was nothing new for Soren this time. As there was nothing on his menu and inventory, Soren moved into the room and pulled lever from the statue just like before.

The statue this time was already displaying the map on the wall, so he pull the lever yet and instead, decided to check it out immediately, since he noticed an obvious difference, that being the room he was currently in, had already turned into a green one. Not only that, but another blue room had just turned into another green room right in front of his eyes, although it was a room on the far right, completely out of his path towards the exit. "Are the blue rooms under a time limit or someone actually here?" Soren wondered, but he had no intention of finding out and quickly chose to make his way towards the exit.

The last blue room wasn't displaying a map, so Soren figured that the room was untouched and pulled out the handle from the statue, The statue then started displaying a holographic statue of the tentacle creature for a few seconds, before its hologram exploded into different pieces. Afterwards, the pieces started flowing around him and upon touching one, it started glowing with a white light, while touching it again, caused the white light to dissipate. After that, he decided to touch randomly a few pieces, but upon touching two different pieces, the white light suddenly turned red, before dissipating and returning the pieces to a normal state. Seeing as touching two different pieces turned their light red, Soren wondered if touching two pieces that could be connected with each other, would produce a different result. The result of that was the sudden combination of the two pieces with a green afterglow, before the combine piece started floating around him once more.

Once Soren figured out how the puzzle works, he quickly started combining the pieces and withing fifteen minutes and a lot of trial and error, the holographic tentacle statue was once again complete. Upon completing it, the statue materialized into a weightless stone version of itself, which fell on his hands, while the other statue stared displaying the map once more. This time, the outer areas of the maze were completely gone and even one of the green rooms looked like half of it was gone, while only one blue room remained, which was to the right of the red room. Although Soren was curious about the possibility of someone else being here, he was also afraid of it, since he didn't know the kind of person he could meet, so he decided to focus on getting through the red room and leave as soon as possible.