He was stuck. He’d tried everything he could think of – taking his shoes off and trying to use his feet. Flipping between the two knobs quickly. Nothing seemed to be quite good enough.

His hand (or foot) had to be touching each knob at the same time, and he wasn’t tall enough (or long enough). He cursed in frustration and kicked the solid stone door as hard as he could. Not even a speck of dust fell.

Unwilling to give up, he grabbed onto the first knob with his right hand, stretching as far as he could again. Not even close. He relaxed his grip so that only the tip of his finger touched the knob, and stretched further. Still not close enough.

Reluctantly, he pulled a silverine claw out of the pouch at his side. He had a few healing pills, the one Suzume had given him, and other odds and ends like his water bottle and a bit of preserved fruit. With now practiced familiarity, he slid the back end of the silverine claw into the flesh of his palm.

It didn’t help. The brightly lit claw clanged against the qi-infused stone like a knife on a cutting board.

He put the claw away and wiped his bloody hand on his pants. His right wrist throbbed with dull pain, and he rubbed it distractedly. When he cultivated at a high intensity, more qi ran through the meridian, making it ache more.

Wait a second – could he use that somehow?

He reached out to the knob with his right hand, but this time didn’t touch it directly. He knew that there was a stream of qi exiting his right wrist, even if he couldn’t see it with his bare eyes. He started a finger’s width away, and watched the water. Nothing happened.

He put his hand on the stone wall, inches from the knob. The water was climbing out of the pool, although very slowly. It seemed like the device would not absorb the qi directly from the air, but it would from the stone around it, if Hudson suffused it with qi.

He gradually backed up further, testing the distance. The water began flowing back into the pool when his hand was about a foot away from the knob. His left hand was still at least six inches from the left knob. Close, but not close enough.

He sat on the floor in defeat. He estimated he had been in the sigil trial for about an hour and a half, and he had been at least an hour late. With six hours total before the portal closed, he had only about half his total time left. He could wait. It was possible – perhaps not probable, but possible – that he had passed others lost on the paths through the forest and they would show up behind him.

Or they were all ahead of him. Did he really think, realistically, that if another participant had gotten lost in the forest, they would also be able to pass through the challenge in the windy gorge? If any of the grasshoppers, he doubted it. Maybe the cheaters – but if it was one of George’s cronies, they wouldn’t help him. They’d probably try to kill him.

If it was Clara, Suzume or one of the S.E.C.T. members he was on friendly terms with, then he couldn’t think they had gotten lost in the forest. They probably had inside information on how best to traverse any possible obstacle in this challenge. If Suzume had known passing through would take two people, then wouldn’t she have waited for him?

The fact that she didn’t likely meant that either she didn’t know, or that there were different paths through the challenge that she did know about, and were passable by a single person. Or that one of the other S.E.C.T. people were waiting for her on the other side of the portal, and they left as soon as she arrived.

Hudson recognized he was being pessimistic, but he couldn’t think of any reasonable or remotely likely scenario where help would come. He could try to back track and search for another way… but he was already halfway through his time, and he had no idea what else was left.

He resigned himself to failure and waiting for some sort of teleport out of the trial when his time concluded. He hadn’t put much stock in this sigil challenge, but now that he was here… it was different.

Maybe it was the massive amounts of qi in the air, or the strange carvings on each of the gates whose meanings burned themselves into his mind. Or maybe it was the austere majesty of the silent forest, or the blissfully tasty fruit that he had happened upon by chance.

Whatever the reason was, he truly started to feel, for the perhaps the first time, that he could do this. He could be a cultivator, go through the trials and challenges, and see where this path led him.

It was thus very frustrating to have that path now blocked to him.

He rubbed his wrist and thought slowly. An idea surfaced from his sea of thoughts, but it wasn’t a good idea. But… it would probably work, right? And he already had one damaged meridian and it hadn’t slowed him down. Why not make it two?

He sunk into a meditative state, and stretched his qi senses across his body. Knowing that what he was about to do would hurt (and continue to ache afterwards) made him nervous. He squashed that feeling ruthlessly, and focused instead on the qi flows running through his body. Just as he had done for his right wrist, he accelerated those flows before flexing his arm muscles and smashing that qi into the spot where the qi eddied and stilled.

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Two times, three times, and then on the fourth try the qi burst forth from his left wrist. The sudden pain shook him out of his meditative state, but he shook it off and stood up, trembling slightly.

He stood in the middle of the doorway, stretching his hands out equidistant between the two knobs. The water began climbing slowly out of the pool; a little bit more on the left side, so he adjusted his positioning slightly.

Hudson accelerated his breathing technique as high as he could, but as the water flowed higher, it was as if there was increased resistance. He pushed harder with his technique, his breath roaring in the enclosed space.

The water flowed up on both sides of the room, filling the grooves on the floor. When they were completely full, they flashed a silvery glow once, twice, and on the third flash, the rock door at Hudson’s back rumbled and fell into the floor.

Hudson let his arms fall and he slowed the pace of his technique. He had made it through this part of the challenge, and felt an immense satisfaction. His run wasn’t over, and he could add this puzzle room to the list of his accomplishments.

After a brief moment to collect himself, he forged ahead. The tunnel quickly turned dark and unlit, and he could see the faint wisps of spider webs. He frowned and wished he had a flashlight; his only source of light were the silverine claws that he had packed in his bag.

As he once again pierced his palm with the chitinous back end of the claw, he idly wondered if he was going to get some strange scars on his palm from doing this. Now that his left meridian was blasted open, he could potentially wield two at the same time. He shook his head – he needed to stick sharp foreign objects into his body less, not more.

The light from the claw dimly lit the cavern tunnel. As it angled downwards, there were side paths – some too small for Hudson to fit into – that branched off or met with the tunnel he was in. He stuck to the main path and hurried forward, avoiding the spider webs hanging down from the ceiling and on the lookout for the spiders weaving those webs.

One of the webs struck him in the shoulder and he thought nothing of it, continuing to walk forward, when he was suddenly yanked to a stop. The thin gossamer of spider silk had not broken from his weight and held him in place. He had been incautious for a moment, and had assumed that spider webs were the same spider webs that were easily broken back on earth.

He cautiously brought the claw in his right hand upwards to his left shoulder to try and cut himself free. But before the claw even touched the web, it melted as if under a high heat.

He experimented with his left hand, bringing it close to another strand. That spider web also melted away into nothingness, blown into pieces by the invisible flow of qi exiting from his meridians.

After that discovery, Hudson picked up his pace through the tunnel, waving his hands through the occasionally thick webs like invisible flame flowers. Finally, after what felt like an interminable number of bends, turns, and switchbacks, he saw a light at the end of the tunnel.

His eyes smarted and he blinked from the sunlight outside the tunnel before he saw a few familiar faces. The tunnel he had exited from was one of many dark entrances in the mountainside behind him. The ever-present mist still obscured the far edges of his vision, but he could still make out they were in some kind of bowl or caldera near the peak of the mountain.

There was a piercingly blue lake covering most of the mountain peak in front of him, and arranged on the shore of the lake were the grasshoppers. Most of them were in various stages of wet and bedraggled, squeezing water out of their clothes. He searched among the faces and finally found Cor.

Cor was standing at the foot of a long, narrow bridge that started at the shore of the lake and climbed upwards as it crossed the lake. The other end of the bridge was lost in the mist.

“Well, if it ain’t about time you showed up,” Cor said with a grin. He grasped Hudson’s hand in a firm, bone-clenching handshake. “You’re late. Where you been?”

“Oh you know, took my time, saw the sights,” Hudson replied with a smile.

Cor gave him a sly look. “You’ve not been fooling around with any of them S.E.C.T. women, now have you? I saw that Japanese girl hanging back to talk to you. She need to confess something to you, or what?”

Hudson sputtered and said, “No, of course not. She just wanted to talk. About stuff. S.E.C.T. stuff and what happens after this.”

Cor shook his head. “Yup, they always want to talk about the future, don’t they? You watch out for that one.”

Hudson desperately searched for a change in topic. “I see that you have most of the grasshoppers here with you. What about Vince? Clara? Any of the others from S.E.C.T.?”

“Clara took Vince off with her on their own early on,” Cor waggled his eyebrows. “Said we should all find our own paths.”

Hudson recalled the chamber he had been stuck in that had required two people to pass through. Or was intended to require two people to pass through.

“I think I know why she took him with her. She needed him for something,”

“No need to state the obvious,” Cor said with a wink. “Haven’t seen any of the S.E.C.T. folks. Well, at least none of the friendly ones. The others, well, that’s part of our problem right now.”

“So what is going on here? And why are most of you soaking wet? Did you decide on a swim break?”

“He brought jokes!” Cor chuckled. “Some of us did indeed end up testing the waters, although it wasn’t their, uh, first choice.

“Honestly, I am very happy to see you here; otherwise we might be stuck. Easier to just show you, though. Let’s go.”

Cor struck out, motioning to the rest of the grasshoppers to stay put, while Hudson followed him up onto the bridge.