With an almost cheat like range to my perception field and the speed of my flight, I map everything in record time. Covering each little nook and cranny has anything remotely interesting. Soon, I enter the middle chamber which lifts the sensory block and I can once again see and hear. This central chamber is even larger than the last one with its thirty-six sliding puzzles, each with three counterparts spread through the maze for a total of 108 copies of the puzzle.

A few of them are actually in range even while I’m in this middle chamber and so I don’t have to move back and forth trying to precisely measure them while slowly taping the pieces into their perfect spot even beyond what is needed to be rewarded a loaf of bread atop the central table.

So I start exactly with them, taping the pieces on the 7 by 7 formations. They protrude from the walls in raised frames out of the very stone and I try to get them perfectly aligned pushing each piece as if my fingers were feathers.

My other half takes over, using his own memories to reconstruct the ones out of range. The pictures depicted are simple affairs, usually being of nature or a table with food, never people.

With time to wonder, my mind turns to the teleporting runes. They taught me a lot back in the instance and my experiments with them were instrumental in developing the portals to other instances, but my understanding of them is shallow and I relied on runes that I learned from other sources to make that work.

By the time the third piece of bread is added to the pile, my senses are fully trained on the process and I grow a lot more interested than previously. Theoretically, what I’m doing is impossible. While I’m in the edges of the chamber, my normal senses including my mana sense are absent, but my perception field is not of a common variety and had grown so much beyond the limitations of the system’s skill that they don’t even compare.

I do my best to record the process, though it’s so brief that I have trouble doing much beyond ‘taking a picture’.

I meditate trying to get myself in the perfect state to feel the teleportation process as directly as I can. My other half notices my efforts and so he stops rushing his part and coordinating our timing to help my efforts. Then I get a glimpse of the flow of mana stretching through space.

It’s very faint but with practice and careful polishing of the window through which I see the world. Even the faintest swirl of space and the trail of mana is clear to my eyes. Though, in the back of my mind I know that perceiving a tablespoon of salt mixed in an Olympic pool is still impressive.

I accomplish the ‘impossible’ or at the very least what was supposed to be in the domain of my ‘betters’, but somehow I discover a whole other dimension to the teleportation.

Without the interference of the system, my perception field grew as I tried new forms of using it and though observing a strong direct space phenomenon was still painful, it was superior to any other sense in most cases.

If before I was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces all turn to the table, now I can actually see the picture forming. I still don’t have a reference to compare it to, but at least the pieces are all turned my way and spread out on a large table. The months, years of practice seem completely worth it even if this turns out to be the only thing useful this skill teaches me this decade.

This is the closest step to understanding enough about the core runes of this teleportation business and how to replicate their effects in full.

Precisely drawing the 3 dimensional shapes suddenly becomes unimportant, and only witnessing it and getting an instinctive feel for them seems to matter.

As we start to move and the number of pictures left goes down, I’m reminded of how quickly everything turned out. Not even two days and I’m ready to return to earth after probably accomplishing what I could inside. But finishing it so even if it wasn’t a bad thing per se, seemed wrong. Not when I wanted to take a closer look around in case I found the last piece of the egg. That tiny eighth piece.

I stare at my reproduction of the egg assembled uncertainly. The symbols and swirling shapes don’t mean anything to me.

Then an idea pops into my mind.

“The last piece might be elsewhere. Ohh, shit.”

With that hanging in my mind, I move back to something that I feel will be more productive. I clear out a small space in my inner world and then for some reason put one of the loaves away. After a minute, the overlapping space of my entire torso is free and then I start my own teleportation experiments inside a space completely under my control.

If the system ends up interfering and I lose my grip on this corner of the inner world, at least I would last a little while with the amount of bread sitting in from of me and the rest in the even smaller pockets stuffed on my limbs. Though losing access to eh main inner world mana would hurt. That would force me to use my Qi and not even the pool around me, but what actually regenerated.

With deft hands, I separate enough of the gold and mithril infused roots to replicate the runes on the table twice over. Then, imagining exactly the working mechanics, without truly understanding how it all works, I go through it slowly working on its impressions and how to replicate it.

Then comes a tiny piece of bread in the middle of the formation as I aim to teleport it. I sit with my back leaning against eh table. The place with the least restrictions on all my senses, even if it makes no difference for resource control and inner world usage as far as I have felt.

I push mana into the upper runic formation trying to get it to swirl as I had seen on the teleportation line, but something fundamental seems broken.

I try it a hundred more times in a dozen different ways modifying the formations ever so slightly or forcing the mana to move in a variety of ways until I can’t think of anything else.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

My second half agrees with my impression:

“These are clearly both receivers, which we kinda knew, but they aren’t similar enough that we can just randomly get it working in a few tries.”

We both look out and then one of my crazy schemes manifests. If there is no other way, I guess the only way to learn more would be to ‘directly interact’ with it. I start to grow a root formation in this hostile place to try to mitigate the effect of the runes on the table and then I place a copy of the formation on the table atop it.

Barely half a foot in the distance shouldn’t matter. Even if it goes wrong with this teleportation, it’s only a single loaf of bread lost.

My formation probably won’t work perfectly, given that engraving was about so much more than perfect runes and worked on a deeper level around intent and the understanding engraved in the wood or metal. But I don’t need perfect, I just need to be a part of it. My other half fights off this place’s desire to consume the roots with quite a bit of effort, until I put the last piece in place.

Then it’s time.

I walk to the edge of the chamber and tap the last piece into place.

My entire attention is on the formation that trying to replace the one on the table and then the space pulse comes.

A connection to elsewhere snaps into place.

Time seems to lose its meaning, as I feel that every blink lasts an eternity, as I’m somehow directly connected to this moment, my class not just passively pushing me to learn more or giving me hints and greater feedback from my gut, but working on an entirely different level.

Reminiscent of the soul connections and portals to both my inner world and the other instances during the tutorial, but also entirely different.

A packet comes down at impossible speeds and I can feel that distance, though only through that connection. It seems to be about a hundred kilometers to its start and then another pulse an infinitesimal amount of time later comes.

I have no way of proving what is at the end of this tendril or even if my impression is correct, but somehow I know it to be the source of the teleportation. As I spin and turnover that instantly stretched into infinity, an explosion of flavor and smell hits my nose and I’m no longer in that wonderful state.

Then I cough at the deeply wrong smell.

Closing my mouth and sprinting out of the chamber, I wonder how it instantly filled the chamber and managed to get through even the sensory blocks of the trial. I guess some things are just too vile to be ignored. A couple of hundred meters away, I get a deep breath of clean air and slow my pace.

As I look backward, my perception field shows me what had been a feast is now unsuitable for consumption. A single type of simple food, sure, but a large pile of it is now covered in some type of goop, green if my perception field gets this correctly. An entire pile of food gone to waste.

“I have to work on the finer points of teleportation.”

Then my attention goes back to sustaining the roots that caused all this. The environment keeps trying to eat even the infused gold inside them, but I push it off and form a relatively new set I learned though highly complex and still finicky with the current design. While retracting them into my little inner world as I walk back into range. No need to waste effort by leaving more of the root exposed if I don’t have to.

A steady stream of mana slowly trakes all the disgusting former food and compacts it seemingly transmuting everything into inert blocks that should be odorless. With another couple of rune formations dragged from the depths of my memory, I organize and clear the air without even using my inner world.

My experiment runs once again in my head and I analyze everything that I did to try to find out what I did wrong and how I could improve it. This is another project that isn’t going to bear fruit right away, but a few more days over here should help to push it along. I was well short of the full month that I set apart for this trial. Even with everything that I still have planned, I’m probably going to return in a week.

It is with that mentality that I start to run around the trial.

Going to the edge of the disk that this place forms and searching diligently for all places that resemble where I found the 7 other egg pieces ends up being fruitless.

I analyze the spots where I found those pieces over and over, but no clear pattern shows up. I try to include the pattern from the last time around and ask others to look over everything but nothing works. I try to analyze both egg reproductions, to see if they can’t miraculously combine. Maybe one of the pieces or the entire egg will fit in a weird angle or something, but after hours of trying every which way, my initial skepticism is proven correct.

But a certain thought doesn’t leave me after it crosses my mind. Just because they aren’t meant pieces of the same puzzle, doesn’t mean the same person didn’t design both. Like two different paintings by the same artist, the intent of the brush strokes, the same rules for the composition. Patterns that loosely resemble another type of rune language or possibly another dialect. My instincts can almost make sense of parts of it, but I’m not quite there.

The rest of the week goes by in the blink of an eye with a failed search for the eighth piece and intermittent breaks for me to test new ideas on the teleportation runes or to witness its effects again. As always the system isn’t too happy about the use of my own resources, but it can’t directly stop me like it could with mana.

Even with my fast movement speed and attempts to make Qi utilization in the central chamber as quick as possible, the ground still shakes a little bit. Luckily the system wasn’t bothered by the experiments I run in my own inner world.

I do learn a few things on the whole teleportation business, even managing to receive something that is probably edible on my last try, but still, I see no hide or hair from the last piece of my egg.

I wanted to feel enlightenment once again even if it was only a hint of it for the briefest of moments. Teat, was brief and it came out f nowhere, but I knew that it was one of the uncorrupted pieces of the system. I guess I will either have to wait till next time or find some other solution.

Walking on the very outer edges of the trial, surrounded by what seems a natural place where this trial was carved out. I see the cracks in the mud and stone surrounding the trial, the paths that water follows and even structures inside the tiny cells from the microorganisms all around me, but I don’t recognize them. For that matter, the construction, rock formations and mineral reservoirs don’t resemble anywhere I knew of on Earth.

“It is time. My stay is over.”

Perhaps the last piece is hidden in another form or I needed to solve a puzzle to unlock it. Other trials had similar clues. Maybe it would only show up if I physically walked the entire place, but the idea that there wasn’t a piece to be found was building steam.

Maybe it is meant as something that I need to understand and create by myself or it’s hidden in a future trial.

I run through the lines of both the new egg and the old one trying to understand their logic.

Unlike my instinctive understanding of runes and electronics, where I could glance at a broken piece and know what is wrong with greater precision than the average mage or technician could figure out after an hour of tinkering, I haven’t formed instincts for this. Those deeply ingrained reflexes are absent because I have no frame of reference and a single egg that worked once and this new larger one that is incomplete are simply too little to work with.

But that idea of it being purposefully left incomplete carries weight.

It is true. In a very fundamental sense, it’s right. More right than I’m about most things, right that is right even if I’m wrong.

“I’m not making any fucking sense am I?”

Echoes of my memories and conversations with myself and the other half spill out and we both just let the mirth build even as I tap the: ‘End Trial’ button.