[Level 5 Scenario]

  [Objective: Master the Void Walk]

  [Step through the Storm]

  [Reward: Technique Mastery, Spirit Repair Progress]

  [Anti-Light Scepter Detected; Additional Information Authorized]

  [The Void Walk is a movement technique designed to form as the foundation of a higher level technique. As you are an inheritor of the Anti-Light Legacy, you have unlimited time to master the technique. Eat, rest, and prepare for the Challenges ahead.]

  The description of the scenario had fooled me into believing that this room would be easy. But it had been two days since I had entered. I practiced the movement technique for hours, training until the Anti-Light Dantian the scenario projected inside of me was empty. Then I cultivated to restore it to full, and practiced for hours more.

  It had taken three hours to learn to cultivate Anti-Light the first time I emptied the core. Unlike the previous scenario, which had provided me with a very familiar Wind-Attribute Dantian, the Void Walk Technique used Anti-Light. The qi was so subtle that it took me hours to detect it. Hours more to remain focused on it, pulling it free in drifting waves from the Light-qi that flooded the challenge room.

  On one edge of the challenge room was a platform that, true to the System’s word, provided fresh food twice a day. It also provided a technique manuscript, containing only the basics of Anti-Light cultivation and the Void Walk. The rest of the manual’s pages were empty.

  On the other was a cliff that dropped into a deep black unknown. Across that pit was a second platform. And between them were a series of metal, cylindrical poles with just enough room to step on.

  Above those was a cloud of glowing purple power that flung me backwards any time I allowed the technique to falter.

  The void below was more forgiving than it appeared — thankfully. If it wasn’t, I would have died. After failing, the scenario gently picked me up and returned me to the platform.

  Over. And over. And over.

  The Void Walk was a curious and finicky technique.

  I peered over the edge of the cliff, preparing Anti-Light in the patterns and shapes of the Void Walk. I took the careful, measured steps outlined by the guide. The movement technique I had been raised with — the Cloudstrider Movement Technique — manipulated the wind, displaced the air, and let you carve a path through the air. At higher realms, it would let you walk among the clouds.

  The Void Walk was a hundred times more subtle. It seemed to almost… shave away your connection to reality. Pushed you away from it. And then the world glid under your feet. The longer you circulated the technique, the greater a distance you crossed with each step. And you crossed that distance faster.

  When executed correctly, my feet landed on each of the exact pillars placed to cross the gap, simply walking over the vast distance between them with no more effort than a stroll.

  Too much qi, and I overshot, the room slinging me backward.

  Too little qi, and I fell short of the next stepping spot, the room once again slinging me backward.

  If the technique was formed too late or too early, it would shatter, and I would be slung backwards.

  I started my one hundred and seventeeth attempt of the morning, landing on the first foothold only a step away. The second was three steps away; I had to maintain my confidence that I would land on it. I raised my left foot, stepping forward and landing ten paces away. I raised my right foot, and —

  I hit the visible, churning wall of black and purple force, like a roiling cloud of energy. But I didn’t falter. My qi became sluggish, harder to control.

  Executing the technique inside of it became more and more difficult until my control of the technique slipped — I shot backward. This time, I was so far away that when I reached the starting area, I was deposited with a gentle glide.

  The attempt replayed in my mind over and over.

  I had been at it for eight hours, and despite this Dantian not even being mine, I could feel the ache in my meridians from foreign qi. It was a sensation I hadn’t had the displeasure of experiencing in years; the various techniques I had cultivated across the years had strengthened and reinforced my meridians far beyond my peers.

  But Anti-Light was weird. It liked to suddenly bend out of my grasp, to contort itself out of shape, and, at the most inconvenient moments, to slip out of control. I stood and paced. I consulted the manuscript again. And finally, I determined that I needed a night of sleep.

  I put a wall at my back and closed my eyes in the [Scenario.]

  When I woke, it was to the smell of meat and spices. My eyes blinked open to see that a new plinth had formed in the center of the room. There was food on it that was still steaming hot. I squinted suspiciously at it, rising from where I sat to circle it.

  [Appraisal] revealed nothing suspicious about it, while my senses registered no poisons. Not that many ordinary poisons would work against me, my body tempered by cultivation. I tested it.

  It tasted fine; I devoured it, and then went back to solving the puzzle of this scenario.

  My control over qi was immaculate. The issue must have arisen from my understanding. I didn’t know what Anti-Light was. So instead of continuing to slam my head into the wall of the technique, I sat and contemplated it, letting it flow through my body.

  It didn’t feel anything like the Light attribute. It didn’t feel like the opposite of it, either. I had a glimpse at its power based on the effects of the Void Walk. Anti-Light peeled me back, away from reality. I was trying to control it like I imagined the Light attribute; fast, powerful, and burning hot.

  I held and observed the qi instead of manipulating it, watching the unique push and pull against reality the energy built as it accumulated. Qi of the major attributes gathered where reality reflected their nature; or where their accumulated essence shaped reality to match it. That was why you found verdant life qi in river basins and not deserts, storm qi over the ocean, and earth qi underground.

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

  “If I had to describe it…” I said, talking to myself as I contemplated Anti-Light. “I’d say that you’re… fixed on your own path. Constantly moving toward your own path.”

  I stood again, circulating the technique with a bit more awareness of the properties of Anti-Light. It was smoother, more obedient. I circulated the technique, reaching the wall that had hindered my progress for days, and passing through it. Then I reversed the technique, coming to a stop.

  When my feet touched the ground, the Scenario room was already gone. I was back in the regular stone chambers. The technique manual was on the ground before me, though. When I picked it up, that roiling black liquid dripped from the pages, boiling away and disappearing.

  I frowned. The old man bound to the Anti-Light Scepter hadn’t appeared this time.

  [New Cultivation Technique: Anti-Light Void Walk, Initiate(Divine Grade)][+2 Willpower]

  [Damaged Spirit Repair Progress: 12%]

  “Only two percent?” I asked with a frown, poking at my own core. The repaired section felt… different.

  I shook my head. The Anti-Light Void Walk wasn’t a useful technique. It used basically no power, but that was with a matching Anti-Light core. The technique forced you to move forward. It was among the fastest I had seen, but that was useless when it barely allowed you to control your direction or speed.

  I continued out the door of the Scenario room. This time, it opened back into the broken, ransacked hallway. A goblin screeched as the door opened, running away from me down the hall. I ignored it, circling back and heading out the other door toward the clean and organized scenario rooms.

  Instead, it also opened into a different broken hallway. The lights flickered. I frowned, turning around again.

  All four doors of the scenario room opened for me without issue. They also opened into the broken section of the labyrinth. The clean and untouched section I had seen before was — the inner chamber — was inaccessible.

  I shook my head in disbelief. Was the labyrinth teleporting me? Or moving around me? I had to prowl passed several broken doors before I found a working door.

  [Level 5 Challenge Room Portal]

  [Accept?]

  [yes/no]

  I accepted, bracing for the wave of black that rolled over me and swept me away.

  One hundred men and women pushed forward, pressed together, crammed into the halls of the recently discovered labyrinth. The stale air of the place shifted with their forward movement. The impoverished, makeshift adventuring militia was tense; quiet. It made the noise of chafing clothes and the occasional clink of metal armor all the louder.

  Poppy stood on the farthest side near the right wall, the people behind her bumping into her as Solder’s men drove them forward. The entire formation was hopelessly inefficient.

  Poppy eyed the person to her left. The lessons drilled into her as a young scion of House Vascara rang in her mind.

  In a shield wall, the strength of the weakest link determined the strength of the wall. Like a chain, the weakest link could break it. The man next to her inspired even less confidence than the sturdy stone wall at her other side.

  Doors to the challenge chambers of the labrynth stood strong at irregular distances, like hungry mouths waiting to open and swallow her whole. None of the mysterious doors had opened for her so far. But that didn’t make her less wary. There was a rumor in the camp that one of Solder’s lieutenants had entered a door marked as a level 5 challenge on the very day they arrived, and, a week later, the door opened to reveal his mutilated body, cold on the stone floor, long dead, and no sign of what had done it.

  No one had exited a chamber alive. Not yet.

  It was a long, long march through the labyrinth before they arrived. Poppy hadn’t been assigned to the extraction and mining teams; she knew that others had been. Any team or person who couldn’t meet their quota of experience a day was assigned more labor; cooking for and fortifying for the camp, and being sent to extract the loot from the heart of the dungeon.

  There were signs of those work teams here. Broken open doors led to plain stone rooms that had been plundered of anything valuable. The doors had clearly been mined open, picked by pickaxes. It wasn’t until we reached our destination that Poppy saw what had become of the labor team assigned to mine — and their obvious destination.

  A section of the dungeon’s wall had been mined open. Black ooze leaked from it, interpsersed with glowing white dots, like the night sky had been rendered into a liquid and poured from a hole in the wall. The air buzzed and filled with the smell of smoke and lightning. She felt her hair stand on end.

  Whether it was from the charged energy that was visibly warping the hallway, deforming the stone, or her sensing danger from the thing sitting cross legged atop the pile of corpses, she wasn’t sure. It looked like a man, only it was transparent, like a ghost. Its figure buzzed irregularly, suddenly deforming or turning into crackling images.

  It had long hair that was tied back around its head. Dried blood stuck to the thing, fully real, old and crusted, caking the sword across its lap.

  And yet it wore no armor.

  Almost as if noticing Poppy’s attention, the things eyes opened, staring down at her.

  The entire formation had stopped moving forward. Whispers broke out about the pile of corpses.

  “Adder!” The small man to Poppy’s left burst out before starting to walk forward. He was looking at the body of a man laying against the wall — one who had been dead for days.

  Poppy grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and pulled him back.

  “Let go!” The man said.

  “He’s gone.” Poppy replied. “Whatever that thing is, its dangerous. Solder gathered all of us to fight one person. That means its very dangerous.”

  The man looked up again at the ghost.

  Poppy threw her head back to look into the crowd. Thane would have been farther back — he was an archer. In a formation like this, he would want to fire way over the line in front of him. But to hit one enemy — it was practically useless. Anna should have been in the second row, somewhere.

  Because she was looking backwards, she was in the exact position to see one of Solder’s lieutenants draw back a massive bow, launching an arrow over the heads of the soldiers and toward the ghost-man.

  Her head snapped back in time to see the monster cut the arrow in half. It was fast. Inhumanly fast. It took a single step, blurring across the ground to reappear a foot away from the front of the adventurer’s battle line.

  It’s sword was already inside a man’s stomach.

  The entire frontline reacted at once, closing inward to fight the monster. With the first swing of its sword, it hit a shield, sending the wielder tumbling to the ground, the blade continuing onward in an arc that cleanly beheaded a man. The second took an arm and deflected a sword. The third cut an arrow in half.

  The front line around the ghostly image of a man charged in — almost all of them had classes designed to front line, to engage monsters directly — and it didn’t help any of them. The shouts turned to screams.

  Spells rained from the back of the line. The two flanks pushed in, struggling closer to the monster, but it beat every person there back with a cold casualness. The more it fought, the more it faded.

  Poppy didn’t reach the monster before it disappeared, growing more and more transparent until its ethereal form collapsed. There was no cheer from the motley group as the monster fell; there were too many corpses in the center of them for that.

  Instead, there was another scream of horror. A second transparent figure climbed out of the puddle of black goop on the floor. Then a third. These ones were much more corporeal than the ghost that had just faded.

  All hell broke loose.

  The formation tried to push backward, to retreat — the first image had claimed a dozen lives by itself, without any armor and holding a sword. The next two forms that emerged wielded two axes and a spear, respectively, and no one here was willing to throw their lives away.

  The entire crowd pushed backward in a wave. Poppy was no exception; she didn’t even need to fight the monsters to see how strong they were. She stepped backward and away from the monster, her eyes darting left to try to find Thane or Anna inside of the crowd.

  Unfortunately for the adventurers, none of them could run. Solder’s loyalists formed a wall of flesh behind them, pinning them in place as the ghosts rushed into the crowd, turning the hall into a flesh grinder.

  Poppy continued to look into the crowd, and toward the monster, for any way to escape the situation. But there wasn’t one.

  She stepped back, expecting the cold and sturdy embrace of the wall to hold her up. Instead, she felt like she was falling into the ocean. A wave of black, speckled with stars, engulfed her.

  A barrage of System prompts appeared in front of her. And then the world was gone.

  [Level 5 Challenge Room Portal]

  [Warning: Scenario in Progress]

  [Accept?]

  [yes/yes]