As soon as Valerica’s mimic dissipated, Momo got to work seeking out these so-called Trials of the Dark Divine. After all, the prospect of being trapped in a dark, bleak library with nothing to do but read for the next eternity was about as appealing as pulling her own eyes out.
So, after casting [Focus]—which she was gleefully happy she could do again—she began to create a map of the library. Thankfully, there were a few books which seemed to be littered around the level for this exact purpose: blank notebooks with attached quills and ink. She grabbed one and settled down at a nearby table, its surface covered in a fine layer of dust.
She started with sketching out the main room, the towering bookshelves and the labyrinthine corridors all beginning to take shape under her quill. It felt like she was back in art school on a field trip to a local museum, sitting on an uncomfortable fold-out chair and trying to find the horizon line amongst a hundred shuffling bodies.
Only now those bodies were floating specks of white, sentient dust.
Before she knew it, she was sketching as she walked, frenetically scribbling details down every time she turned a new corner. She marked each section of the building meticulously: the central hall, where the massive book had been, the narrow aisles lined with ancient tomes, the shadowy corners where the spirits had led her—all of it went on the map.
She noted landmarks that could serve as reference points: a twisted, blackened staircase that seemed to go infinitely upward, a row of windows that looked out into a void of swirling mist, and a peculiar statue of a hooded figure holding a lantern.
All of a sudden, a book jumped off the shelf, and landed squarely on top of her map.
It sped through a flurry of pages before landing on one in particular. She recognized that familiar font immediately. This was a courier in disguise.
Congratulations! You have gained a level in Artist—
ERROR! You can no longer gain levels in the mortal Class System
Searching for a solution…
Solution found: Merge Artist class with God System
Note from System Administrators: STOP MAKING US INVENT NEW SYSTEMS.
…
Praise be! You have taken on the godly passtime of [A’art.]
A’art: A’art, etymologically and historically, is the predecessor to the mortal fine arts. Before humans got crafty with oils and brushes, Morgana and her lot were messing around with time and space itself, making origami out of black holes and embroidering seat cushions out of soul chains.
You have gained the skill [Nether Origami]:
Nether Origami: Fold infinite spaces into real dimensions
The book slapped closed, and hoisted itself back onto the shelf. She just stared after it.
What an unbelievably strange ability.
She sighed.
Who knew I should have been studying quantum mechanics instead of the sword.
The idea of folding space seemed incredibly odd at first, but after taking a few moments to consider it, its usefulness dawned on Momo. That kind of skill would have surely come in handy in Mordecai’s domain. His ability to elongate space seemed to be completely inverse to this one; he was able to expand real space into the infinite, like unrolling a carpet that just kept going and going. With this, she could roll that carpet right back up.
Gah. What a strange thing to visualize. Momo’s head was starting to hurt.
Seeing no use pushing beyond her limits, she curled up on a pile of desecrated books, and she took a nap. Or a… sleep. She wasn’t sure. The lighting never changed in this place. The same old flickering purple torches just kept on flickering. The swirling mist outside continued to … swirl.
Everything was in permanent stasis, and that thought alone made her even more tired.
No. She pulled harshly at her own hair, peeling herself away from the comforting embrace of the stone floor. Valerica had left her with those last warning words for a reason. Hold on tight to your sanity. Tight was not nearly a strong enough suggestion—Momo would need to put her conscious mind into a stranglehold.
Because this place was obviously designed to make doing anything at all feel pointless. Why it was designed that way, she had no idea. Wouldn’t Morgana want her lesser goddesses to be inspired, excited, invigorated? Not pounded to death with sad monotony.
As she contemplated that question, her eyes drifted to the staircase not so far away. It was the obsidian spiral staircase she had noted as one of the key landmarks on her map. When she had tried walking up it the first time, things had just gotten progressively darker and darker, until the point where she couldn’t see, feel, or hear at all.
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Walking in the dark was one thing, but wading through complete oblivion?
No thanks. Terrifying.
Given the terribleness of the whole ordeal, she assumed it naturally had to be one of the trials. A problem that required godly intuition to solve. But her mind drew only blanks.
It had all just felt so terribly…
Infinite.
Momo’s eyebrows slowly rose.
Cha-ching.
—
On second thought, why had she wanted to become a god so badly in the first place?
Valerica wasn’t nearly grateful enough for what Momo put herself through to help her.
That was something she’d tell her just as soon as she made it out of this stairwell.
“Hello?” Momo shouted into the endless abyss. There was no echo.
She had felt very brave for a moment climbing all the way up here—about three stories, by her estimates—until the stairs completely faded out of visible existence, and her hands went cold, and silence enveloped her. But now that she was surrounded by nothing but void, her confidence deflated like a shriveled balloon.
Because, well… she had never tried to shrink an infinite space before. She doubted it was as simple as downsizing a large t-shirt in the dryer. What if she accidentally got caught up in it? Folded like a bedsheet until she was nothing more than one of those floaty white pieces of spirit dust? Oh, gods—could that be it? Were those spirit particles just lesser gods who had given up and failed the test? Forever destined to haunt these dreadful walls?
Her chest heaved up and down. She laid a hand over it, and breathed.
It’s okay. The spell will work. And if it doesn’t, you can’t really die in here, anyway.
She raised her trembling hands upward.
“[Nether Origami]!”
As the spell departed her lips, she was overcome with the sensation that she was suddenly reeling something in, like a fishing rod had been placed in her jittering grasp, and the void around her was a massive fish caught on the tiny, flailing worm that was her willpower.
With a cosmic crunch, the swirling black plane around her went concave. It then pressed inward with a terrible screeching noise, as if she was trying to force closed a rusted beach chair. But as the void curved around Momo, she could begin to see a horizon line—just like she had searched for so many times in her paintings—and just past that line was another set of stairs in the far distance, hurtling toward her at lightning speed through the darkness.
She cried, closing her eyes and clapping her hands over her ears. But eventually, the screeching died down, and she apprehensively squinted into the darkness.
Only to find a door waiting in front of her.
It was old, aged oak with two handles. In disbelief, she looked behind her, and saw the familiar opening to the ground floor where she’d begun.
She had done it.
It was as if an infinity had accidentally snuck in somewhere between the staircase and the door, and now Momo had stapled it shut.
Swallowing down, she pressed her weight into the door. It opened with a long creak.
And blinding light flooded her vision.
Dungeon of the Dark Divine
Level 2 Breached
Trial Complete: The Endless Staircase
Trial 1 / 3 Complete
Objective failed: Read required texts
She grimaced, a headache forming as her eyes adjusted. At first, she was excited that she had entered some place with sunlight—but those hopes were quickly dashed as she realized the light that was blinding her was not natural light at all. It came from a lantern, one that someone was swaying very obnoxiously in front of her face.
“Oh Momo, you are as entrepreneurial as ever.”
Momo’s heart thundered to hear Valerica’s voice again.
Valerica withdrew the lantern with a laugh. She was unfortunately still not Momo’s Valerica. She was still embodied by the same little light spirits. But hearing her voice—seeing the general sadistic shape of her—was enough.
Momo breathed out a long sigh, letting all the anxiety pass through her.
“Hi, Valerica,” Momo mumbled, before adding, with much pent-up frustration. “What the hell kind of trial was that? I thought I was about to be sucked up into… nothingness. It was horrible.”
As usual, Momo’s frustration failed to make a single dent on Valerica’s exuberance.
“That, my dear, was the Endless Staircase,” she said unhelpfully, giving Momo a thumbs up. “Well done! Usually most people do all the required reading first before even noticing the staircase, but not you, evidently. You just… steamrolled right through.”
Momo frowned at her in confusion. “Only because I received that very helpful skill from my Artist class first. I don’t get how anyone else could even solved that trial without it. The staircase just led to complete oblivion.”
Valerica laughed. “Oh, dear. You’re so creative. No one else in the history of the universe chose to solve the test like you did.” She paused, pursing her lips. “I suppose since you’ve already completed the trial, I can actually show you how it was supposed to be solved. Here. Let’s compare notes.”
She snapped her fingers, and an old-fashioned projector fell from the ceiling, clattering to the floor. This room was much smaller than the one downstairs, just a stone cell with four walls, like some kind of underground bunker, so it was the perfect place to project a video. When Valerica pressed a button on the projector, light streamed onto the wall facing away from them, and a grainy video began to play.
The video was recorded like a low-budget true crime documentary, and it followed Valerica from an over the shoulder perspective as she walked through the library on the first floor.
“This is footage from my own onboarding,” Valerica added, pointing at the screen with her flickering finger. “As you can see, I had already finished my reading.”
What she was pointing at was a giant pile of flaming books. Every single tome in the library had been flung into one giant pile, and torched, leaving the bookshelves bare.
“You must have… enjoyed the reading,” Momo mumbled.
In the video, Momo watched as Valerica walked by a bookshelf with a gleaming golden lever attached to it. She hadn’t noticed that anywhere down on the first floor.
“That lever.” Momo’s eyes widened. “I didn’t see it when I was doing my map making.”
“Well that’s because it only appears once you’ve finished your required reading. And you didn’t touch the books, so… ”
Momo frowned. That, she did not.
“So what does it do?”
“It makes the door to this level automatically spawn at the end of the first set of stairs. It’s the main way you complete the first trial, a cheat-code for anyone who puts in the effort to actually read all of the required material before proceeding. Sera found it very easily.”
Momo’s frown deepened.
Of course there was a cheat-lever. Then again, she couldn't be that mad—she had managed to get around the reading, after all. That was a ginormous win.
Something in the video grabbed her attention. The Valerica in the footage had waltzed right by the very obvious lever and toward the stairwell, and was now ascending the stairs into the void. She had done all the reading, and yet still completely ignored the cheat-code.
“Wait,” Momo interjected. “Why didn’t you pull the lever?”
Valerica turned to her in confusion.
“Why would I ever say no to a quiet little walk through oblivion?”