My heart thumps in my chest, as I go faster than ever before. Ten mana per second enters the runes, and I’m propelled at unbelievable speeds. The trees rush by so fast they seem like a fuzzy green carpet.
I make sweeping wide turns, given my speed, while trying to avoid any spots much lower or higher than the treetops. Suddenly dropping a few meters is not much of a problem, but every time I dropped in height on a clearing or something, I had to slow down a lot to climb again safely.
I look at the makeshift speedometer, not a precise way of measuring speed without bothering to precisely set control distances and clocks but the best approximation puts me at roughly 200 kilometers an hour. This is nearing the hard speed cap, even 30 mana a second didn’t break 210 to 220 kilometers an hour.
Back on earth I never moved this fast, I never needed to fly on a plane or travel on a maglev train. Even if I had, this is something else altogether. Flying close to the ground on such a small vehicle is closer to speeding on a motorcycle than anything else.
But eventually, not yet tired of the rush, I turn back. I could have gone for days on end riding the high, but after clearing my head I know my course of action. With about a mana point every second, I zip by at 150 kph.
Even without stupid amounts of mana, I can still triple my previous travel speed and for that I am grateful. No, not just grateful, I am ecstatic.
The feeling that my bicycle gave me so long ago was back and it is like nothing else. Even on Pando with so much else to do, I still hadn’t retired my two wheels. The sheer joy of approaching a new place on my own power knowing little to nothing about it was amazing.
As the night ends I return to the hastily constructed hut right in front of where I ran into the Black Panther.
I open the system screen and focus my eyes on a few words.
Trial Pending
Perhaps it would be better to wait a little longer before heading in, but I can’t. I have already spent too long stuck at Lv. 10. It is time to make good use of the mountain of Exp sitting there unused.
My fingers twitch just as I touch the button. Each beat of my heart sends pressure throughout my body. I feel all my body tingling. What will happen?
From one blink of an eye to the next, I’m standing elsewhere. I feel a little funny. Turning off the perception field, I realize why. There is a similar skill active that I turn off.
A look around tells me I’m standing in some kind of ruin right out of a movie. A small chamber with a single corridor to leave. Everywhere I look is covered in rough stone, even the small dome on the roof of the chamber.
I turn this new skill from the system on again, if I’m not mistaken it is the skill I should have gotten with my class. After ruffling through my stat screen, I find it.
Perception Field. – Lv. 1 Provides an omnidirectional sense of all that is around the user. Skill level determines Range and Resolution. Distance: 1 m
I stand there for a few moments trying to get used to the skill. It takes me way longer than it should. The feeling is very similar to the skill I have developed by myself, but the range is very low and I can barely tell the ground is rough with it. Far less information than I am used to receiving.
I try to look in my inner world with it but I’m left disappointed. The skill can’t even perceive that I have an inner world. After another minute of trying to get used to it, I turn on my normal perception field. After fiddling a little with it, I manage to exclude the volume of the lesser skill gifted to me by the system. Now I will be able to both level the skill and still have the benefit from the range of my original skill.
Prepared, I open the system prompts, and look at the last one.
You have entered a class trial. The trial will begin when you leave the chamber. All senses except the Perception Field will be severely muted. All skills are locked except the Perception Field. You are to explore the space around you, a score will be assigned for your performance on the trial. If you fail, you will have to wait 30 days before retrying. Each attempt reduces the potential of the class. You will lose all progress made while inside the trial. A prompt will show up in case the user's life is in danger or you wishes to forfeit the attempt.
I stare at the words, but after a few moments I shrug. I focus my full attention on the outside, but nothing useful returns to me. So I follow the single choice and start walking.
As soon as my feet touch the corridor I feel a wrenching sensation and suddenly I am at a loss. I look for Pando’s seed, but he is gone. A few roots are still spread out throughout my body, but nothing else remains. The inner world is out of reach. I try to use some Mana, but it's like my fingers are buttered and I’m trying to catch a fish. No even harder than that, like I’m trying to catch the very air.
Nothing is as it’s supposed to be. Frantically, I try my best to connect with the inner world again, even drawing my Aether to see if it can help. After a moment, I faintly feel Pando’s seed and the inner world moving away. Tears come unbidden out of my eyes and I can’t even feel as they drop, muted my sense of touch has become.
After a minute of fruitless efforts doing my best to reach out to all that was taken from me, I get up and wipe my eyes. Now is not the time.
I’m not unfeeling but something drives me and all that is not for the purpose of finishing this trial is set aside.
I extend my arm out and with all my strength close my hand. I can’t hear or feel popping my joints must have made, but I can imagine it.
I will succeed.
The system seemed fit to take everything from me during this trial for some reason. That was its first mistake.
Within me, I try to grasp my resources.
First step.
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Fail to grasp mana.
Second step.
Fail to grasp stamina.
Third step.
Fail to grasp Health.
Fourth step forward, I find resistance but succeed in grasping Vigor.
This cycle continues as I start to map out everything around me.
It wasn't nice, but after a little time thinking, something good may come out of it. Even with a few minutes here and there focused on vigor, I spent too little time improving my control of it. The system made stamina so much more convenient to use, but relying on these resources is a mistake I will not repeat. I will not spend stamina as long as vigor is an option.
Looking at the Heath and Mana pools within me, I decide to take control of those resources by myself so nobody will be able to take them from me.
Vigor and stamina are very similar, and when one is depleted the other follows well at an equivalent rate, but I was much more used to vigor. So I hold this thought in mind much more easily given there is nothing to distract me.
Soon I come to the first choice in my path. Another corridor and the question burns in my mind: Do I turn right or continue going straight? Even with the greater range and feedback, the original perception field doesn’t tell me anything about what is ahead so I pick left and continue running. It only takes me another two turns to basically confirm a theory about where I was.
This place is a maze, a three-dimensional maze that spans a good area and I was supposed to map. Like a labyrinth designed to confuse even the smartest people. I have a good memory but not that good so I retrace my steps and find the initial chamber. Using Aether as I have done thousands of times before the system, I connect with the thin roots spread out in my body. They show no intelligence at all so I have to painstakingly move each of them myself.
It's strange and it takes me time, much longer than I wished, but the effort will pay off. A strange map begins to form. Kilometers of roots within my body begin to be shaped following the turns and elevation changes all around me. A new organ starts to push to in my abdomen, the only place where the 3-dimensional wide map wouldn’t interfere too much with my other organs.
Luckily Aether seems unaffected and I still could affect the remaining roots spread out in my body, without them I doubted I would fare well in this trial.
Unsteady on my feet given the reduced proprioception I am under, I continue to run up and down always turning to the right unexplored corridor on intersections.
There is no day or night, though even the little light there was in the beginning soon fades or my sight does, I can’t tell which but I’m fairly sure more than 24 hours have passed.
I continue to map the place and strange as it may seem, I’m glad. It was painful losing any contact with Pando’s seed, but it feels as if my body is my own again. I had had intermittently felt like this in the last week, but this is different. This wasn’t just a moment or an epiphany, so I began to follow my katas again. The Aether around me follows lazy and slow in its natural cycle as I continue to feed it with a thin stream from my internal stores.
I find another dead end. I’m almost turning around when I notice something different. A difference in texture in a piece of the wall I almost missed. My normal perception field, now at 5 meters, can’t perceive it yet, so turning it off I approach using only my natural ability.
Minutes pass as I slowly trace each of the lines in my mind. It vaguely looks to be an engraving but if it is, I can’t recognize a single rune nor the rules for how they intertwine. I only have a limited amount of roots within me so I won’t be able to store things indefinitely, but something tells me this is important and I make a copy separate from the map of the place.
Finishing up, I turn around and start to make my way back to the closest intersection with some yet unmapped corridor. As I put one foot in front of the other in the perpetual motion of falling and catching myself, also known as running, the symbols don’t leave my head.
There must be some meaning to them. They look like runes, but I can’t use mana in this place, so even if they are it won’t be immediately useful. Could they be a puzzle or a language?
Those are the only choices that make sense to me. Plenty of other things cross my mind, like them being works of art, but I dismiss all of these ideas as soon as they show up.
Twelve hours later I run into another of the scribbles in a dead end. I stop and start to compare it to the copy I have within me. They look very similar, but after about ten minutes, I’m certain of my conclusions: they are not the same.
Sure a superficial glance may make them appear copies of each other, but there are quadrants shifted. If I split it into 9 pieces, one is half an inch to the left, the other half an inch higher…. Yes, I think I get it.
It’s too complex to remember the whole thing without a copy or a photographic memory, but I just need to store the changes, the positions they have been shifted to.
As I’m about to leave, I sense something liquid in the other wall. Approaching, I touch the wall feeling, even through a very muted and fading sense of touch, how fast my body heat is sucked away.
Water, I found water. At least one of my immediate needs is taken care of. Turning off the system skill, I focus only on the more familiar version of the perception field. At about 5 feet from the ground, water comes out straight from the wall, as you may find on a natural formation. Behind it, however, there is nothing. No mana, no runic formations, no reservoir, no feeling of magic, it just sprouts out of thin air.
Too thirsty to care about that for more than an instant, I put my mouth against the wall and start licking the spot trying to get as much water as possible. It is frustrating letting so much of the precious liquid fall away so I try using my hands, arms, and even my shirt but nothing works. Finally, I manage to form a seal with my lips around it and without separating myself from the wall, slowly gulp down the water accumulating in my mouth.
I spend the next twenty minutes there attached to the fountain of life until I’m full. In an hour or so my body should have absorbed it all, and I would be able to continue drinking.
I think of waiting and resting a while, but I just keep going. I can always come back. Running to the next part of the exploration, I feel my stomach grumbling, but I ignore it, they could have made my hunger magically disappear for this trial if they were taking everything I was carrying with me, but it’s not the end of the world, just a little hunger.
As I continue, finding these puzzles becomes more and more routine in-between my jogging bouts.
The days pass and the thin covering of fat on my body starts to change. My skin turns gaunt and almost unnatural. I have always been thin, but this is something else.
I stop at regular intervals to sleep for what I guess to be about two hours. Otherwise, I keep going far beyond what I have ever pushed myself to in the previous world. I know that lack of food isn’t something that I would die from while I still have any skin covering my bones, but this was way beyond what I had done in the past.
On the sixth day what I see before me is very different. Even before I approach, the opening doesn’t come to a sharp stop, but a big chamber emerges in my perception field.
I halt and approach it slowly. Even as I enter it, I can not sense the other side or the celling and if the slight curvature of the wall behind is any indication, the chamber is at least 50 or 60 meters wide.
I run along the circular wall, trying to map the chamber. Every 10 meters or so there is another door. I pass 17 other doors before I come back to the one I arrived through. Carved in the walls between each of the doors is something very similar to what I found on those dead ends. I turn off the skill-based perception field to concentrate on their shape.
A close look reveals a near copy of the puzzles I found. Curious, I creep along until I’m touching it. This one however seems different somehow, not just the raised frame of rock giving a distinct feel.
I touch the middle with my finger and the barest of brushes shifts a small piece slightly. One of 9 pieces and I finally understand what this is supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do. I choose one of the puzzles I found and start moving the squares to the sides, up or down to match one of them.
When I’m finished, I think of what could be wrong, but I try the next puzzle I found and another and another until, finally, something happens. Behind me, I feel a tremor through the ground with my perception field, seen as I no longer can even feel pain with my skin. Turning around, I walk to the middle of the chamber. Each step is slower than the last but I don’t stop for an instant. The faint senses muted to the point of uselessness start to come back as I make my way and even my vision comes back.
What greets me is so wonderful I don’t have words to express. I ignore the chamber around, the design and the stone in the middle of the chamber, focusing only on what sits in the middle of the stone table.
A piece of bread.