Chương 24: Wisdom and Knowledge is Scarce

The collapse announcement came while I was still looking at my inventory notification. [Floor Nine: Collapse Sequence Initiated. Estimated time: 6 minutes.] Six minutes. Fifty meters below the gate threshold, in a basement under a gothic chamber I had just finished wrecking, with fourteen mana in my reserve and no staff. I sat down on the compressed earth and crossed my legs.

"What are you doing," Mimir said.

"Recovering mana," I said.

"YOU FOOL! The floor is collapsing."

"In six minutes," I said.

"I have time." Humans had this idea of sarcasm, were essentially, they would reply in an obvious manner. I wanted to tell this self-proclaiming god that I could leave him here. But that would bring a reaction, a reaction I am sure I would find 'funny.' But would not matter in the grand scheme of things.

"You have six minutes and you are sitting."

"Yes."

"Now be quiet." The lower chamber was quiet after the collapse sounds from above finished settling. Fifty meters below the floor nine exit, give or take. I had measured the drop by counting seconds on the way down, which was not a precise method but was accurate enough to tell me that Wormhole, with its observed-range requirement, was not going to reach the gate from here. I sat down on the compressed earth and looked at my resource display.

[RESOURCES] [Health: 201 / 310] [Mana: 19 / 300] [Stamina: 44 / 100] Nineteen mana. Not enough to fight anything, not enough to run Wormhole, barely enough to maintain Mana Circulation at minimum output. I needed to recover before the collapse sequence reached this depth, and the only way to do that in the time available was to do nothing. I closed my eyes. I had learned this from a monk build, early in the runs, before I had understood that the class carried techniques the system did not formally list as skills.

The monk's meditative posture was not in any skill tree. It was not announced or quantified. What it did was create conditions where the body's natural mana recovery ran faster, the same principle as Mana Circulation but without the active channel, and it worked by removing the competing demands that movement and thought and active processing placed on the reserve. I thought of nothing. Not deliberately. Thinking of nothing deliberately was still thinking.

What I did was stop directing the processing, stop running projections about the floors ahead and the trader and the class advancement screen and Mimir and the text I had read about Devas, and let the system run in the background without the foreground demanding resources from it. Mana Circulation was still active. Mana Pathfinding was passive. Pathfinder was passive. I let all of them run without looking at the outputs.

"You are very strange," Mimir said, after about thirty seconds. I did not answer. Another thirty seconds passed.

"The floor is collapsing," Mimir said.

"it's… it's… shaking!" I did not answer.

"I can hear it," Mimir said.

"The structural sounds. Above us. Getting closer." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I breathed.

"I am a god," Mimir said, "and I am telling you that we are going to die!" How odd, I thought that gods do not die… from the mythological and religious scriptures. The mana reserve was climbing. Slowly, slower than Mana Circulation alone would have managed, but the meditation technique was adding something on top of it. I could feel the reserve filling the way you felt temperature changing, not a single moment of change but a continuous process that only registered in aggregate.

"Are you listening to me," Mimir said. Something happened. I do not have a better word for it. Something in the center of my chest, not the chest exactly, a point adjacent to it that the monk texts had called a core, responded to the mana passing through the circulation channel in a way it had not done before. Like a second rhythm running under the first, not competing with it but matching it at a different frequency. I opened my eyes. The chamber was dark.

The darkness was absolute, and the only light came from Mimir, the blue-white pulse at a steady interval, and in that light I could see the threads. Purple and gold, woven through the air of the chamber in patterns that the Pathfinder trait did not produce and had not produced before. They moved, slowly, the way threads moved in a current, and they intersected with each other at points that the trait was trying to classify and failing to. I saw myself in them. Not a reflection.

A series of instances, each one distinct, each one in a different posture or state or engagement, and they were all looking at the point where I was sitting cross-legged on the compressed earth with my hands folded in my lap. Running. Falling. Impaled. Crawling. Climbing. Screaming. Slumped over something. Reading. Attempting something that might have been laughter. Eating, which I had not done in this run and had forgotten was something bodies required. Sparring. Facing a Titan.

Running an archer build, a swordmaster build, a berserker, a monk, a lancer, a samurai. Fifty-two thousand versions of the same thing looking at the version that had chosen mage. They all looked tired. Then Mimir screamed. Not a dignified sound. A high, tight sound with no divine register to it whatsoever, and it pulled me out of the cosmic darkness and back into the chamber, which was no longer quiet. The collapse had reached this depth.

Dark shapes were falling through the gap above, dropping from the chamber floor into the space below, and they had white eyes and white teeth and they were hitting the ground and getting up immediately, and the Pathfinder trait was announcing something I had never seen on any previous floor. [Enemy Level: 999] [Entity Type: Floor Devourer. Collapse Sequence Active.] Nine hundred and ninety-nine. The entities that came with floor collapse were not enemies I had ever engaged.

Every previous run had ended in death or departure before they arrived, and I had always understood them as a timer mechanism rather than an actual threat, something the tower sent to enforce its schedule. I checked my mana. [Current Mana: 187 / 300] The meditation had worked. Not fully, but enough.

I was on my feet before Mimir finished screaming, and I activated Arcane Burst at the nearest shape as it oriented toward me, firing at the concentration point the trait was marking, and the discharge hit and the shape did not go down. Level nine hundred and ninety-nine. Of course it did not go down.

It also did not reach me, because I was already moving, using Pathfinder's read on its approach vector to step aside at the last possible moment, and the shape went past me and hit the wall and I was already tracking the next one.

"Move," Mimir said, urgently, which was more useful than anything it had said since I had pulled it off the ceiling. I moved. Arcane Burst at my feet on both sides, using the discharge force to push off the ground faster than my Agility alone could manage. The technique was something I had figured out during the floor six predator engagements and had not had a name for, and it was not a skill in the system's registry but it worked, and right now it was the difference between being caught and not being caught.

I covered the distance to the wall and went up it, using the same burst-push technique at intervals, ascending the vertical surface in a series of short powerful contacts while the shapes below reoriented. Fifty meters. I climbed. The shapes below did not pursue vertically, which I noted and filed as the most useful piece of information I had gathered about them in fifty-two thousand runs.

They moved horizontally with extreme speed and did not appear to have the same relationship with vertical surfaces that I had just established. Twenty-five meters from the top. Mimir was pulsing rapidly, the blue-white light flickering in a pattern I was reading as agitation.

"Faster," it said.

"Working on it," I said, between contact bursts. Ten meters. The edge of the gap was visible above me, the broken stone where the chamber floor had given way, and through it I could see the wrecked interior of the lower chamber I had dropped through, and through that, the gate. I caught the edge with both hands, pulled, and came up over it in a single motion.

I was on my feet in the wrecked chamber with the gate thirty feet ahead and the collapse sounds coming from every direction now, and I ran at the gate and hit it with my palm and it opened and I went through. The gate sealed behind me. The between-floor corridor was silent. I stood in the white space and breathed and looked at the gate I had just come through, which was intact and solid and showed no sign of what was on the other side of it. [Floor Nine Cleared.] [Level Up: Level 21 to Level 23.] [Experience Gained: 36, 800 / 40, 000] [Attribute Points Available: 79] [Hidden Area Discovered: Chamber Beneath. Bonus experience applied.] Mimir pulsed once, slowly, from inside the inventory.

"We are alive," it said.

"Yes," I said.

"I contributed to that you fool." Mimir said. I did not argue with it. The warning had shown itself before as much he had said a single word. He didn't contribute to nothing at all. I started walking toward the floor ten gate.

"You are welcome," Mimir added.