Chương 62: 62 Loop 2, Part 16

I skirted the surface of the river with my chair a few inches above the water, which was as close to swimming as I intended to get all week. I'd picked this one because its current looked the slowest, which was the most sophisticated selection criteria available at the time. I held my marble between the chair and my knee, where it threw light on everything I cared about looking at. The light bounced back weirdly, though. It went down into the water, maybe only a foot, and then stopped.

Like something down there was pushing back against it. [Wideview] gave me the whole tunnel at once and did nothing at all for the water. Whatever the river was doing, it was doing it to the light itself, and not to my eyes. The river never got deeper. I could have thought longer on that. But I had already spent too much of today thinking, and what I wanted was to finish this and take a nap. I hadn't had anywhere near enough of those lately, and it was starting to show. I yawned again.

My mana was deep in the green, but every few seconds, the bar blinked, like it was being nibbled at. I'd been at 560 when I'd entered the tunnel. I kept that number in mind, just in case. The walls were smooth cut stone, black, patterned with little swirls. Up close, I could tell every swirl had been made, by chisel or spell, all to a consistent depth, but with a different pattern for all of the blocks. Somebody had done that to each individual stone in the tunnel. The effort involved made me want to lie down.

The river ran straight for almost a hundred feet. And then it started curving to the right and down. And then it curved again, and again. But despite this, the water never got deeper, and the current never got faster. Then there was the sound. In a tunnel that narrow, I should have been drowning in echoes. A splash, a scrape of the chair, the shift of air in front of me. I got none of it. The river ran past my boots in total silence, and I disliked it more the longer it went on.

Everything else in this dungeon had a price on it. Keys, locks, a thirty-six hour timer, an entire floor built to make me work for the privilege of leaving it. This tunnel had asked me for nothing, and I didn't trust anything in it. At that thought, I checked my mana again. And… fuck. It was down. Not by much. Only 6, since I'd entered the river. But 6 was not 0, and nothing in here had permission to touch my mana without asking. I sped up. The number sped up. So it wasn't time.

I stopped dead in the water and held still for a slow count of thirty. It didn't move at all, which settled it. It was distance. Every foot of this tunnel cost me mana. Which meant the trip back cost the same as the trip in. Which meant the smart move was to turn around right now, at 6, and take the loss. But I kept going. There was a key somewhere on this floor, and I was not going to be the reason we put in even more effort later. Lazlo, Flag said through the tether after about fifteen minutes. I found something.

It's a root.

"What? What do you mean, a root? Like a tree root?" Yeah, a tree root. It's coming down through the ceiling, and it's going all the way into the water. Oh, and it's as thick as my old legs. Not these new ones. They're too skinny. And it's weird. The bark has, like, these little squares in it. Almost like someone carved patterns into the tree. Oh, and there's moss, and it's growing on one side, but it doesn't make sense to me, because there's, like, no shadows in this room, because there's light everywhere.

"Flag, is there a key?" Oh, no. But the water's moving like waves, and when the waves reach the root, the root makes a sound. Like it's singing, almost. Hmm. Professor Thane used to sing when he was alone in his office. He would sing these weird songs. And he'd do it, like, almost fourteen times a day.

"Flag, I'm hemorrhaging mana right now. Is there anything else? Or can we talk about this when we make it back up?" Oh, no, this was a dead end, he said. I went all the way to the end, and there's just the tree root and the moss. But there's no key.

"Great. Wonderful. So your path was a bust, too." Oh, I wouldn't say bust. He paused. Lazlo, can I stay a little longer? I think there's something important to this room.

"Yeah, buddy. But you need to make it back by the thirty-minute mark." Okay. I made it to the end of my tunnel, hoping that the fact I'd lost mana meant there was more to it. But instead, it ended at a blank wall. I poked and prodded every brick, and cast the only [Detection] spell I knew, and still nothing. The same patterned stones surrounded me. The river ended in a dry alcove, big enough to park my chair. That was the entire prize. I turned around and paid the price a second time.

By the end, I was down 132 mana. Fuck my life. But I noted this path for later. Because if I knew anything about dungeons—which really wasn't much—I knew there was always something behind the design of them. And that there were no true dead ends. Usually. Probably.

"Mine ended in a blank wall," Finn said before anyone could ask.

"It went straight for almost eight hundred feet, maybe a mile? I don't know. I kept thinking it would turn or something, but it just stopped at a dead end."

"Yeah, mine was the same," I said.

"Well, except the mana drain."

"The mana drain?" Stolen story; please report.

"Yeah. Mine ended with a blank wall after curving for a bit. But I lost 132 mana just going down the stupid tunnel." Finn grimaced at that. And then Axe turned toward us and spoke.

"I found a gate. There was a weight-operated button, and when a golem stepped onto it, the gate opened."

"That sounds like a real puzzle," Finn said.

"I left the golem standing on it. He's still there."

"Oh."" The gate stayed open the entire time, but behind it was an empty room. I tested every wall, and there was nothing. I almost didn't test, but Finn insisted." Good job, Finn, I thought. I guess he had studied a little bit of Dungeon Theory, too. Flag finally joined us about a minute later. We decided to divide the rest of the work the same way. That took all of twenty seconds or so, because nobody had a better idea and everybody was tired.

We all hated that there had been four dead ends, but at least there were four more rivers. The key had to be down one of them. Axe had already jumped onto his path, and then Finn and Flag chose theirs. That left me with the fifth river, by process of elimination. I was just happy I didn't have to put in the effort to make a choice. Like last time, this path sloped downward. But unlike last time, it was making the river faster. [Float] helped me control my descent. And this time, the river was deep.

So deep that, despite the seemingly crystal clear water, I couldn't see a floor. Even with the marble providing light. The walls gave way to an opening about twenty feet on either side, forming what was practically a lake. And the water changed with it. Whatever spell or property of the river had been pushing back against my marble light wasn't doing it here. The magical glow went dozens of feet straight down until it thinned out on its own. All three of my golems fell and sank to the bottom.

I could feel them moving slower than they should have through [Mana Tether]. The pressure was doing something to the way they walked. Unlike the other part of the tunnel, I could see clear to end here. And then I saw it. The key was far below me, undisturbed. Now, there was the problem. I didn't know any water-breathing spells, because my entire life, I hadn't spent much time in water. Sure, developing one had been on my list of lifesaving necessities for a while.

But it was sitting comfortably at the bottom, underneath every other item on the list. And unfortunately, it was going to keep sitting there. I needed a solution in the next five minutes, not the next five months. I didn't see any ways out of this situation aside from one. Manifestation. Thankfully, it was a cheap spell. [String - Manifestation] Cost: 4 mana. Manifest a single length of plain string. Duration: 1 hour. I cast the spell, and then I cast [Enlarge], but I focused the spell.

Instead of making the string thicker, I made it longer. That was one of my favorite parts about the spell. It was variable. I wound one end around my marble in a knot and lowered it over the side. The light shrank as it went down. First to the size of a coin, and then a spark. The marble was exactly as bright as it had always been. It was simply a very long way down. And every foot of that took light off me and gave it to the lake.

By the time the marble landed, I was sitting in near darkness with my hands on one end of a string. It took almost two entire minutes. And of course, my golems weren't coordinated enough to do this properly. But I had an idea. I had golem one hold the key. And then I had golem two take the marble. And then I had the second golem run around the key, over and over and over again. The golem wrapped the whole thing in manifested string while I sat in the dark a very long way above them.

I had to cast [Enlarge] four more times because the golems kept running out of string. Every one of those came off my mana bar. The whole time, I was waiting for the knot to slip. It was a very weak string and had no business holding a key, or a knot, or anything else. But it was all I had to work with. Once I was relatively certain the golems had produced something that functioned as a knot, I started pulling up. And pulling up. And after a while, I got tired of that. Yes, five seconds was a while, okay?

I decided to make my work easy. I tied my end to the chair, and then cast [Shrink]. [Shrink - Alteration] Cost: 4 mana, variable. Shrinks target object or magical effect at variable scale. And cast it again. About five minutes later, the marble broke the surface, and the key came up with it. I caught both and put them in my lap. I told Flag first, because he was the only one I could talk to.

"I found the key, Flag. So if you're done with your path, we could be back at the entrance." Oh, that's good. My path is boring. There's no roots. And the stones aren't talking to me. Which is sad. I wanted to make new friends. I thought I was the only one who would've found a good room. But when we came back to the entrance, Finn and Axe both had something to report. Finn's room was a hall of mirrors. Every surface was polished into a silver sheen that reflected back what was on the other end.

Finn had felt like he was going to be lost. But he had marked the turns using a spell. And when twenty-five minutes had hit, he'd turned back around.

"It was clear there was more to the maze," Finn said.

"I actually thought the key was gonna be at the center, but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss our meet-up time. I figured if nobody else had found the key, we could have explored it together."

"My room," Axe announced,"was full of provisions. Some sort of cold storage. Enough food to feed an army."

"Well, that sucks." I gave him a confused stare, though I knew where he was going with his statement.

"Because we wasted our time with the food spells," Finn said.

"Are you joking? As awesome as the food storage is, we never have to go down that path again. That's not wasted. Think of all the effort we're saving by not going down there." Finn just facepalmed. I held up the key so everybody could see it.

"I found the key. So whatever's down those other paths is something we can figure out later." I checked the time, and we had spent about an hour and twenty minutes.

"One key and four locks," Finn said.

"Yep."

"So, which door are we gonna open?" We didn't know what was behind any of the doors. The chains were identical. The wards were identical. Even the fact that the doors were situated by the corners was identical.

"That one," I said, pointing at the nearest door in the direction I was facing. Imagine if I'd had to turn. Finn didn't even try to argue. He had known me too long, and he knew he wouldn't win. I twisted the key into the lock, and the chain fell to the floor before it all started dissolving. The door swung open into a room that smelled of mildew and smoke. Then the heat came out, and it put me and my chair six feet back down the hall. I fell out of the chair as it rattled against the ground.

I was flat on my ass, with my eyebrows in worse shape than when I'd started.