I have loads of fun teasing the system, making it move around me chasing its own tail, but my attention is limited, so I turn to the building map. Some things are still like I expected. The trial didn’t get an immense jump like last time. From 500 meters, it went to 600 between corridors and the length had also increased by roughly those 20 percent.

With less than 50 percent more total distance if I wanted to run every single corridor, I still expect to end the trial fairly quickly, but I’m not content with just completing it.

It has to have other secret conditions, like the one that I unlocked that allowed me to attempt a second trial right after.

Even if that wasn’t on the cards for some reason, I may have unlocked something else with a little more exploring. Probably not the missing piece of the ‘easter egg’, which I will definitely get this time around, but there is untapped potential here. This time I make sure to actually come in and touch each one of the pictures with the shape I need for the puzzle pieces in the central room.

That’s exactly what I do, mapping the entire place and physically touching the end of the corridor, both with the puzzle references and the egg pieces.

I find all 7 egg pieces to form yet another almost complete egg design, though like the last one. Worse yet, the design isn’t interchangeable with the last one which had been a faint hope. They are like two ancient written tablets, each missing a piece, but they aren’t the same text. Maybe in the future with a dozen of these, I will learn the language, but that day isn’t today.

The Mitrhil infused roots in my own body do an amazing job keeping me afloat and my increasing level of control avoids some of the negative system attention from using a resource. So I no longer get Earthquakes, just from standing still for a few seconds. I take the time to focus more on not only my mana control but also my body. I strain muscles, ligaments, tendons and bones given that’s still the fastest way to move around corners. And saving a decent amount of Qi and Mana from the inner world a few kilometers away is just a side benefit.

In the central room, I slowly teleport the pieces of ‘bread’ with runes covering the entire thing and the perception field trained on the process during brief breaks. Now even further attuned to space, I catch glimpses I missed last time: the actual warping needed to induce matter teleportation. Though for now, that’s a moot point. My natural space warping powers are nowhere near strong enough to replicate the feat. Like a buddying telekinesis that can only lift hairballs and paper instead of throwing people around. Such weak powers would be more hindrance than help to move weights in the gym.

It might be enough to nudge in the right direction, helping to keep the balance or to lock a machine like a third helping hand, but it doesn’t replace actual muscles nor do I have the mental dexterity to use it instinctively just yet.

I also need to figure out how the teleporting runes work.

On my way to the central chamber, I follow the ‘Greek’ architecture. Even with the different veneer compared to the first couple of trials that leaned more towards an Egyptian theme, fundamentally it still has the same structure and it’s starting to grow stale. I know that I’m missing something and that keeps me going forward, but I have no idea what that could be.

I explore each and every cubic inch of the place.

When I finish going through the entire place, I choose a different corridor to go through slower, trying to catch a glimpse of something important. Sometimes I walk, other times I jog. But the two days long exploration grows to six days without new discoveries.

I switch things up again, this time running instead of floating and paying more attention to what I’m covering with my perception field. I stop and meditate looking for patterns small and large at every corner, I play with system screens, Qi, Life and my old friend Vigor.

I fill myself with power and then release it all in a calming exhale, but nothing seems to change.

Aether comes to the party, as I tap into a portion of Pando’s harvested stores and I even brush my precious attuned Aether, but none of that is enough.

Still, that is not to say my time is wasted. I grow more used to my skills in the unique environment even uncovering the intricacies of space runes after another stop at the central chamber. Though without destructive methods I’m unwilling to use on the teleportation table, most insights are small additions to our knowledge base.

Staring at the strange swirling patterns of the eater eggs, patterns that might help me attain a hint of enlightenment once again if I manage to complete isn’t fruitless but the progress is meager gruel meant to fill the stomach rather than provide real sustenance. As I push my runic language skill, it seems to interface ever so slightly with the eggs, but I can tell that it is nowhere near enough for me to call it a ‘success’. Without a rosetta stone, I’m probably gonna need at least a dozen different examples to crack the code.

Another week later, I get fed up with the entire exercise, so I tap the return button while interfacing with the blue crystal beside the table in the central room. After confirming my option, another message shows up.

A message I hadn’t seen a hint of until now, but one brings joy to my heart.

Do you wish to attempt the second tier of the Trial?

A message that is both infuriating and wonderful that encapsulates a hint of the system as a whole and its quirks, given that I ‘know’ the result to be the same as what was erased from my mind the last time around, but it’s a different question.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

The system keeps changing, and for me, more than most. Like a thousand others of its idiosyncrasies, I have no idea why.

I tap the little button and a slow process starts. A teleportation that has only the barest of time melded into it and that requires power even the system hesitates to use. I sense the tendrils of its ‘will’ reaching. I can probably escape if I try, at least for a few instants. The same feels true for the mild temporal suppression, but I don’t interfere with the process.

Nearly a minute passes in real time, though only about two seconds for me as power builds beneath the surface of reality. With well over a thousand perception points, even those two seconds become an interminable wait as I alter my own perception of time.

I try to sense the power building in this underlayer of the system. And not only through normal means but even catching glimpses beyond the pane of glass that keeps me ‘safe’ from the madness of the world. All my system gifts help: the mana manipulation, my normal senses, the skill based perception field and even the space/ time manipulation skill surround my natural version of the perception field.

Even then, I only catch the barest of glimpses of what is underneath.

Madness strikes as I think about breaking the glass box that is between me and the world, but my gut warns me against it and I listen.

However, I’m not limited to them, my natural space sense integrates with the perception field and even my intuition guides me in understanding the world. The system is using more power than I had ever seen used to this day.

The layer of reality anyone else sees is calm like a pristine lake without a single ripple in its surface. But in another dimension, the system thrums with impossible power and this duality threatens to break my brain.

With so much will, liquid mana and even other forms of energy like plasma, I expected to see a rendition of reality, vibration and heat wafting off from that confined space, but everything is kept under inhuman control by the system.

Then the collapse comes in an instant. Like an eternal memory, that power pulls the underlayer of reality and I’m suddenly standing elsewhere. My tenuous connection to my inner world extends to infinity. It's both present and yet not. Luckily, I have all the small space I ‘carved’ out in my own body. Something that probably increases the cost of teleporting me, but not much.

My senses fully come back. I feel the grass underneath my bare feet, instead of only seeing it with the perception field. Fresh air fills my lungs in the wide open sky. Space shares heaviness and lightness I can’t quite comprehend and the significance of the moment tries to change my natural Aether field.

I let it.

All these tiny increments mold me and what I experience shapes who I become. This isn’t something I’m attempting to avoid. I step forward, but this time, an actual system screen pops up with actual sound, something less than a person in a million people ever experience on earth if the reports I read are accurate.

“Warning, death in this place is permanent and no system protections are in place.”

“Interesting.” I had seen a lot of the supposed protections of system users and without some of the limitations placed on the invaders and the malicious people in the instance, we would have been screwed. Maybe even screwed enough we would already be a relic of the past.

I focus on my perception field on the surroundings as I walk in a clearing about 200 meters wide. In the spot I arrived, sits a blue crystal similar to the one I encountered in the trial’s central room shows up and this is what finally gets to me.

“So it’s even stranger than I expected. I won’t even have to find the safe way out?”

It's time to explore, though before I actually get an idea of what I will do I probably shouldn’t stray too far from the ‘safety’.

As I step farther and farther away, the very grass follows my movements oh so slowly. In the distance, I sense something changing. The spawning of a single beast over a kilometer away.

I run to it.

My instinct is to pulse my Qi out, but with the limited supply I have at my disposal without the tremendous accumulation I cycle through the inner world, but I try it just the same. The system is as reluctant as ever and in some ways, the restrictions simply got stronger.

I can still internally use it, but even if I can communicate with plants and nudge themselves in a particular direction, the uses are limited. I don’t stop to properly test it, but even brushing my Qi on a plant leaves them disintegrated a moment later as the system erases them from existence. A similar property to the last trials which resembles the void, eroding the foundations of a material and slowly undoing it atom by atom until not even ashes are left behind.

The process here may share the same roots, but its way more Violent, as if two different forces were taking similar actions. As usual, my clothes are replaced by the ‘starting garb’ that will be taken away as soon as I step out and anything I take out of the tiny inner world in my body becomes world enemy number one unless I spend considerable willpower protecting it.

I keep one eye on the recently spawned hog that appears to have heard me even while I’m a kilometer away and he is coming closer. But something else calls my attention, an idea that should work but I still need to test.

With my bare feet already touching the grass, I ask them to weave in a particular pattern and slowly, over a minute they come together. I can probably alter their properties if I don’t add anything. Asking individual leaves to grow or shrink seems to have some effect, they slowly start the process.

I commune with nature in the way I had learned. Some of the things I ask, I know it will take days, days, weeks or even longer. Time that I will have to constantly be at hand to guide and improve, but if I want, I can construct something. And as the system’s interest nor even the mildest hint of the caustic void or system attention arrives.

I may not be at full power, nor does my other half have his full capabilities, with the tiniest shards of the seed brain hidden in the small space available inside the piece of the inner world I managed to fit in my body, but he is functional.

Then the first spawned Hog finishes its charge. It comes filled with complete and utter rage, fuelled by the dirty rabid Aether power that seems to be cheap for the system. Apparently, the system can’t ‘clean’ the Aether, so it found another use. The only thing it drives now is to kill, so I answer in kind.

With a single punch, aiming at first at its snot, but twisting sideways at the last moment, I karate chop its neck.

The fight is over. No suffering, no struggle. The only mercy I can give to the mob.

It almost feels unfair, even if I know that there is nothing I could have done differently, not when the system has spawned a dozen others in the time this one approached me.

“What does any of this have to do with my main class?”

Grabbing a young tree, with its trunk almost as thick as my arm, I pull it from the ground asking for it to give way. It barely helps, but my strength is enough and I break it off without too much twisting.

Carrying it a hundred meters away in the middle of the clearing, I start to build the first piece of the puzzle towards protecting myself from the increasingly larger number of beasts.