Noem wiped the dust from his arms and sucked in a breath through a layer of Filter-ing Qi. He raised a hand to shield his eyes from the strangely bright moon and tried to get a sense of how far down he was, but the smoke concealed all. His interface told him he’d climbed down for almost seven hours now, but that just couldn’t be true. If it was, the moon wouldn’t be out for at least another two hours. And it definitely wasn’t bright enough to cut through the smoke in a way the sun couldn’t hope to do.

That wasn’t even considering the fact that the quarry had been twenty minutes deep. At most. But even with Resilient, Nimble, and Focus active, Noem still hadn’t reached the bottom. And even though the moon cut through the smoke like a knife, it didn’t give off anywhere near enough light to pierce the smoke down below. Just as it hadn’t pierced the smoke below an hour ago.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Noem wondered aloud and deactivated Focus. He waited until the cooldown was up, then activated Collect and continued downward. “It’s way too deep, I’m pretty sure that’s not the real moon up there, and the Qi just keeps getting denser and denser the further down I go. Guess the goddess told Mona to come here for a reason.”

He hopped over another ledge and landed on one leg already mid-stride. The dust puffed up and was swallowed by the curtain of black haze, and Noem felt little miss meteor shudder in his waist pack. She’d had a few more of those the deeper he got, but she wasn’t quite at the point he felt he needed to be worried.

“Look at me. Feeling like I need to protect a rock.” Noem chuckled. The world fell ever so slightly as he dropped once again, and the rattle of grenades in his pack almost set him on edge. He’d had to leave the dangerously fragile stuff behind, which meant no skills-in-orbs for him. “Gotta find some more natural anchors to drain for their skills once I’m done with whatever this is. Maybe I can sell the process to Ajiana for, like, one-hundredth of what little miss meteor’s worth.”

Noem kept walking in a straight line for what felt like hours. And when he checked his interface again, hours had indeed gone by. His stomach grumbled at the lack of food, but he made it settle for water. He opened his map and zoomed in on his current position, which was still inside of the Great Quarry. Perfectly in the middle, in fact.

“Now, see, that doesn’t make any sense. I’ve been walking for hours, and I’ve got a pretty good pace going, so I should’ve hit the other side and started going up a few hours ago. How damn far…” Noem cut himself off with a shake of his head. “Gotta get that depth chip installed for the map. I’ve gotta be thirty kilometers deep at this point.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

His next step hit solid smoke. A hard click, like the sole of a boot against a stone floor, rang out for a split second before the smoky haze swallowed it whole. Noem raised an eyebrow and tested his footing, which hung in midair with seemingly nothing to support him. Qi as vibrant as a sunrise on fresh snow lapped at the edge of Noem’s senses, leaking from something he couldn’t make out in the distance.

“Well, that’s something at least. C’mon, little miss meteor.” Noem shifted his pack even though it sat comfortably on his shoulders. “Let’s see who’s inviting us in.”

He trekked over the empty smoke for less than a minute in perfect, unchanging similarity. The intensity of Qi from the threshold didn’t seem to get any closer, he couldn’t make out any difference between one stretch of smoke or the next, and his map wasn’t of any help at all. He eventually gave up with a shrug and swiped away his interface.

Light and sound came together in a slurry of drunken Qi that wrapped around Noem like a warm blanket in a cold alley. He held up a hand and brushed the sensation away, but it held fast and sunk through Resilient like he didn’t even have a skill up. More than anything, that piqued Noem’s attention. His skills were the only thing he was truly confident in, and for something to bypass them so easily, it meant they had to be powerful. Even the one apex he’d fought six years back hadn’t broken through Resilient as easily as this foreign entity had.

{Incoming transmission unable to deny. The message is as follows: ‘Do not fight the influence. It only wishes to bring you closer.’ An additional surge of Qi was included, but your security protocols prevented it from being delivered. Allow it through?}

Noem tilted his head to the side. Something was alive in that disturbance. He felt the grin grow to show his teeth while little miss meteor rumbled against his hip.

“Let it through.”

The smoke disappeared. Noem fell less than a meter and landed softly on a floor that looked as if it had been made out of the exact same stone as the Great Quarry, but without any of the flecks of colour. He let Collect and Filter fall, then raised Focus and React to replace them. His hand subconsciously went to his knife, and he undid the snaps that kept it in place as he surveyed the extremely small room he found himself in.

Eight steps in any direction. Once and half again his height. All the same stone as the Great Quarry, but filled with so much Qi that it was almost funny. And, somehow, it was perfectly lit without a single light source. Noem cautiously took his first step in this prison of Qi and stone, which caused a ripple through the surface of the stone as if there was a thin layer of water over it.

“Rippling stone. More Qi than I’ve ever seen outside of a storage facility.” Noem hummed and pressed his fingers to the wall. His Qi joined with the extravagance of the stones, and when he pulled back, Resilient was completely gone from his fingertips.

He stared down at his hand for a few long seconds. Nothing had ever eaten his Qi like that. It wasn’t rough, or vicious, just… there one moment, then gone the next. Almost like the wall had pickpocketed the Qi right out from under him.