CHAPTER 23: BACK INTO THE RIFT

Or, at least, she tried to separate the two strands. Instead, Jenna blacked out for a few moments as her Magical worldview split. Her conscious mind was trying to see the threads as separate despite her unconscious mind holding onto the idea of the two parts of her Magical connection being intrinsically linked.

When she finally regained her sight, Jenna was unsurprised to see that there was no longer a thread connecting her finger to the cloud of Magic. If anything, she was just confused that the cloud had managed to maintain its form while she was unable to consciously control it.

Disappointed, Jenna turned to the second page of the newest section of her Grimoire.

Query: Have you given up on the First Technique already?

That was a first. Jenna hadn’t ever seen the Pyramid put its own editorializing into its comments on her actions.

“I blacked out when I tried to split the strands of my Magical connection, and now I can’t see the thread at all. I sort of assumed that meant that the method wouldn’t be the right one for me.”

Minor error: Any method for visualizing Magic works for the sufficiently powerful Mage. To be precise, every method for visualizing Magic given is necessary for a different Spell of Eighth Tier. Powerful Mages need to be able to visualize their Magic in a number of contradictory manners as the Spell requires.

“So does that mean that I need to be able to use this visualization technique now?”

Query imprecise. Best guess: Is being able to use all seven of the visualization techniques vital to my ability to pass the First Year in the Pyramid? Accept guess?

“No? I already know that I’ve met the requirements for the First Year here. I can see my Status.”

Query updated. Best guess: Is being able to visualize Magic using all seven techniques vital for my ability to complete this rift? Accept guess?

“Now that you propose that as a question, I am a little curious,” Jenna admitted, “but no.” The Pyramid was being frustratingly obtuse with how it responded to her. She had a feeling that it meant she was closing in on some secret that it didn’t want her to know but that wasn’t technically forbidden to her.

Query updated. Best guess: Is being able to visualize Magic using all seven techniques vital for my ability to Identify at the Third Tier the rings that I have obtained in the rift so far? Accept guess?

That was more or less what she had been wondering, but the exacting specifications that the Pyramid gave made her suspicious. “Guess accepted,” she said, making a note of the Pyramid’s exact wording.

No.

“Is being able to visualize Magic using all seven techniques vital for my ability to Identify at the Fourth Tier the rings that I have obtained in the rift so far?” That seemed like the obvious error it was trying to trick her with.

No.

Hmm. That was a little strange. “Is being able to visualize Magic using all seven techniques vital for my ability to Identify at the Fourth Tier the rings that I am likely to obtain in the rift?” Technically she probably should have asked about the third tier as well, but Jenna assumed that identifying something at the fourth tier was more important. After all, she was able to gain the information from the first and second tiers of identification while working on the third.

Insufficient data. No way to perfectly predict what rings you will obtain. Answer at 95% confidence: No.

“Is being able to visualize Magic using all seven techniques vital for my ability to Identify at the Fourth Tier the coins that I have obtained in the rift so far?” The coins were really the only other item she’d taken from the rift up to that point. She didn’t really think that they were Enchanted, but-

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Query imprecise.

That was strange. The Pyramid always gave her a suggestion. Jenna quickly fished through her bag and pulled out a coin.

It didn’t seem Magical. When she sent a small pulse of Magic into it, however, it resonated so deeply that she felt like she was resonating to it, rather than vice versa.

“What was imprecise about the query?”

The Pyramid didn’t respond. Jenna tied the coin in string so that it was suspended. Maybe she would be able to get some kind of information out of the coin from wrapping it in Magic.

As she started to gather a cloud of Magic, however, the Pyramid finally responded.

You have been loitering in the rift safe room. Time until forced exit from rift: 40 seconds.

As she watched, the timer ticked down.

Jenna stuffed the rings and coin back into her bag and picked up her mace. The practice, while not ultimately fruitful in terms of learning what anything she had was Enchanted to do, at least let her recover physically. She stepped back into the rift, beginning the fifth floor.

Unlike the prior floors, Jenna was not filled with a sense of nervous excitement. Nor was she filled with a sense of lonely fear or barely repressed sorrow. No, Jenna felt a single emotion resonating through her entire body.

She charged towards the single goblin in the hallway, barely pausing to shatter its chest. She hardly heard its gurgling screams as she turned and ran immediately into the room on the right. Before the goblins had time to react, Jenna had sent the mace through their necks.

On instinct, she quickly began to loot their corpses, only then realizing that the Pyramid might be playing her. After all, even if there was something about the rings that it was trying to keep from her, that didn’t mean that there weren’t also treasures it didn’t want her to find on this floor.

She found another ring on one of the goblin’s corpses as the other room finally made it to her for their ambush. They fell just as quickly as the others.

Jenna began to wonder how much her time in the rift had strengthened her. As she stared at the corpses, they really did resemble the goblins that she had struggled to kill with her teammates before entering the rift. She didn’t think that she had been in the rift for long enough for any significant changes to occur inside of her.

As she thought a little longer, though, Jenna realized that she hadn’t seen a timer since she had collapsed while trying to separate the strands of her Magic. There was a chance, however slim, that she had been unconscious for hours or even days. She forced that thought out of her mind as she finished looting the dead bodies.

There were more coins, but no more rings. When she checked the coins, all of them were at least as resonant as the first coin she had found. None of them were resonant in quite the same way, though.

Jenna searched the room with a renewed vigor. She was growing more and more convinced that the Pyramid was trying to hide something from her on the floor.

She was stopped by the first piece of decoration she had seen in the rift. Rather than the standard iron band around a burning piece of wood, one of them had engravings across it. Jenna reached out to it, curious if there might be some pattern she could feel in the wood grain.

When she grasped the torch, she was surprised to feel it start to shift. The torch came down with a click, and the wall beside it faded away. If Jenna had to guess, she would assume that was one of the secrets her teammates had been talking about.

The new area was dark, so she took one of the torches from the wall and walked into it. The further that she traveled down the hallway, the warmer it got. By the time that she saw her first goblin, sweat was already running freely down her entire body.

The goblin didn’t seem to be handling the heat any better than she was, so even though her mace nearly slipped out of her hand, she still dispatched the monster quickly. She was confused about the source of heat in the hallway, especially because it seemed so dark. Shrugging, Jenna continued down the path.

At the end of the hallway, in some twisted parody of the rest of the rift, there was a T intersection. The heat was clearly emanating from the left, so Jenna turned right. Ten paces later, she was close enough that her torch showed her a blank wall.

Sighing, she turned around. Bracing, Jenna walked towards the heat. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see, but a large and glowing red crystal was not it.

Intricate gold lines and swirls were connected to it, clearly powering some large Enchantment. Jenna considered her next steps as the heat grew more and more oppressive. Destroying the Enchantment felt wrong, but so did destroying the crystal.

Maybe there was some lesson that she was supposed to be learning here. As she kept looking at the crystal, she noticed that it was not glowing continuously. It slowly pulsed brighter and slower, as though there was some regulation loop inside of it that was not quite perfect. As the minutes ticked past, her breathing and even heart rate started to sync to the pulsing of the crystal.

When the heat stopped feeling so oppressive, Jenna had an idea. Maybe she just needed to identify what was wrong with the Spell so that it would be a continuous glow. The pulsing, while soothing to her, felt more and more wrong the longer she watched. Something about it gave her the impression of harming both the crystal and the connecting gold pieces.

Jenna looked at each piece of the crystal and Spell in turn, trying to understand any piece of it. It felt almost familiar, but she couldn’t tell why. When she noticed the spiral engraved on the top of the crystal, though, she realized what it was.

The entire crystal was surrounded by the Spell for Harden Glass. Even Jenna’s worst attempts had never heated up the glass so badly, which made her wonder if there was some deeper level to the puzzle. After studying the crystal and Spell for a few more minutes, she shrugged. If there was another level to the puzzle, she was unable to see it.

Of course, being able to recognize that the crystal was being targeted by an incorrect variation on Hardened Glass was only the first piece in solving the puzzle. She needed to figure out how Hardened Crystal was different as an Enchantment, if at all. She needed to derive what the optimal shape for the Spell would be on something that wasn’t a flat surface. She needed to confirm that the lines of gold served an identical purpose to the lines of Magic that she would normally push into the surface of the Spell. She needed to figure out which of the lines was broken, and then she needed to fix it.

Rather than bemoan her fate, Jenna got to work.

Jenna’s Status:

Jenna Fredrickson First Year Spells Known: First Tier: Hardened Glass Expected Years Completed: 7 Prediction Confidence: 47% Points: 5 Qualified to Ascend to Next Year? Yes