Ryan held out his hand, summoning Jester and Gregor as well so that they could help out with the search. They were trying to find any of the 40 symbols that were on the hatch's lock. Just anything at all.

  However...

  "You guys find anything yet?" Ryan asked with a sigh, and Silvia and Modak looked at him while shaking their heads.

  "Nope. Are we even sure this is something useful?" Modak questioned as he pushed away some trash with his foot, "Don't you think your family would have found the hatch before as well? It's not like it was hidden all that well."

  "Hm..." thinking about it for a moment, Ryan stopped what he was doing - tearing the sign off one of the stands - and looked at the orc, "It could be a luck thing? Like, maybe it's not always there? Or maybe they just didn't really care about the hatch. They use the dungeon to train newly awakened folk, so this area probably just didn't seem that useful to them."

  "Or... Runar was hiding it from you again," Silvia suggested.

  "That's also possible. Either way, this place is clearly not just a 'safe zone'. If I can get an easy 'perfect completion' reward here, I'll go for it immediately. For now, just keep looking, if we can't find anything soon we'll just move on and I'll come back here some other time."

  The trio and the spirits continued on searching through the area for any sort of clue, hidden on the trash or some of the stalls' walls, signs, or posters. They didn't find anything useful whatsoever; it was all just exactly the same as the different zones of this dungeon.

  After a while, Modak just stood there and was fiddling with his tusks, "Maybe there's some clues in other zones? It could be a larger-spanning puzzle?"

  "It could be..." Ryan responded, tapping the foot with his ground while looking around, "I tried to look into some of the history of this place, and they used to do a whole bunch of stuff that visitors could do across. Like, it's why the monsters drop the coins. You'd get money for the gift shop from doing things for the mascots, or by collecting pictures of the petting zoo animals. So maybe there's some kind of thing for the food stands, too... some kind of punch card, or something."

  Modak raised his brow immediately, pulling out the map that he had grabbed just in case earlier to take a look at himself. There was some other information on the page, though the letters were largely 'corrupted' and scattered, so you weren't able to actually read it properly.

  "I think... I think I might be able to figure out what this used to say," Modak explained, trying to squint his eyes, and Silvia took a quick peek.

  "Huh? Isn't that just a random mess of... randomness?"

  The orc quickly shook his head, "No, no, I don't think so. This dungeon is clearly extremely methodical. Hell, it even makes an extremely accurate map that it keeps regularly updated, right?" he held up the pamphlet that he was holding, "So it's very likely that there's a pattern to the distortion of letters as well. I mean, I every sort of magic has patterns, and if I can analyse the mana frequency and the pattern of distortion within the dungeon, I could make some kind of algorithm to translate these distortions."

  A massive grin formed on Ryan's face, "And that's why you're called the prodigy of the magic tower."

  Modak's face flushed in a dark green, "Wh-What, who calls me that?"

  "I did, just now."

  Silvia nodded approvingly, "You know what, I think it's already catching on. 'Prodigy of the Magic Tower', that sounds pretty good. It's got a ring to it."

  "Urgh, just shut up..." Modak groaned, pulling off his backpack to grab his laptop. Ryan's grin quickly disappeared.

  "Dude, you brought your laptop? To a dungeon?"

  "... Well, what else could I do but that? I figured if something important came up, I could use it for something like this," sitting down at one of the rusted tables, Modak flipped open the laptop, "I've already been working on something to visually analyse magic frequencies using the images captured by the tablet, so if you just give me a little while, I should be able to figure something out."

  Modak slowly pulled his arm out of his sling. Though his arm was broken, his hand was still fine, and as long as he didn't move his arm too much, he could take it out. Rather, he was somewhat encouraged to move his arm around a little bit so that his muscles didn't atrophy in the month it took to heal, so this should be fine. He quickly took out some cables and connected his laptop to the tablet to move over the pictures that he took earlier, and before either Ryan or Silvia knew it, he had already started typing on the keyboard.

  The two of them stared at the orc's fingers, moving rhythmically and fast. Silvia leaned over to Ryan, whispering to him, "What do you think his dexterity stat would be?"

  "... Gotta be on the upper end of things. 1.2, maybe 1.3. At the very least," Ryan suggested, "Your sister's a lucky woman."

  Silvia grimaced with a slight shudder, looking at her friend with a disappointed sigh, "Ew. Just... ew."

  With a slight laugh, Ryan patted Silvia's shoulder, "While he's doing that, let's just keep looking around. This is a completely safe area, so we don't need to worry about him."

  "If you say so," Silvia shrugged, walking with Ryan back over toward the stall with the hatch in the floor, "I'll try to use my insight again, maybe I missed something the first time?"

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  "Maybe? What did you look at the first time?"

  "Just the whole area, kind of," Silvia broadly gestured at 'everything', "Should I try looking at anything specific?"

  Ryan considered it for a moment. He climbed back into the stall, squatting down in front of the hatch, "What happens if you just look at the lock itself? Do any of the symbols look special to you? Like, maybe you can see which ones make up the code?"

  Without hesitation, the elf shook her head, "You know that's not how that works. If I look at the lock, I can really just kind of see the vibe of it. I could paint you a magical lock after that, if you want," Silvia explained, "I'd probably be able to see what connects to the lock, like, if there's anything important to this whole puzzle if I look at it with insight, but nothing too specific like that."

  With a sigh, Ryan stood back up and leaned onto the counter, looking into the direction of the spirits, "Did you guys find anything?"

  They looked back over toward him, shaking their heads or giving him a thumbs-down. Ryan looked at the back of his hand, "Do you have any ideas? Do you think you might be able to just pull apart the hatch with your skill?"

  Tiar responded quickly, and the red pattern on the back of his hand turned into a small frowning face. They had already gotten much, much more expressive than they used to be, though they still only responded with pictograms rather than words. Not that Ryan had any problems talking to them in the first place, though.

  "No luck, huh?" Ryan sighed, tapping his finger on the counter. He glanced to the side, seeing the old, worn-down menu. It had the same jumbled letters that the map pamphlet did. Getting a gut-feeling, Ryan pulled out one of the plastic coins, jumping back over the counter, "Look at the entire shop while I do this. Tell me if anything happens."

  Silvia nodded her head, though she didn't quite know what was going on. Her eyes lit up in a purple, pink, and blue shifting light. And right then, Ryan placed the coin onto the counter. Instantly, Silvia let out a gaps, and Ryan looked at her with a massive smile.

  "Did it work? Did you see something?"

  "Yes, I did! When I looked at the counter... a plastic coin just appeared on it!" Silvia gasped, looking over at Ryan whose smile immediately dropped.

  "Oh, fuck you."

  "Nah, but really, I can't really see anything? There's like a twinge of something there. But I'm not sure if it's just what I mentally connect with it. The way that my insight skill works is that it's all filtered through my own experiences and view of the world. So it could just be that it's reacting to you trying to pay for something, instead of something magical actually happening."

  Ryan tapped his foot on the ground, thinking about it more, "Like... the dungeon mimics things that happened here. But all in a kind of messed up way, you know? It feels like some weird shit happened here while it was still active, and the dungeon took that and mixed it all together with the main business. Illegal trade through the gift shop, maybe a murderous mascot, rabid petting zoo animals. Something like that."

  "So..." Silvia started, leaning forward to take a closer look at the stall, "This place was a massive front for some shady business? And you think the same was the case here in the food stalls?"

  "It could be. I'm pretty sure normal food stalls don't have magically locked hatches like that," glancing inside the stall, Ryan let out a deep sigh, "What if there was some kind of... code people had to say? Some special order, maybe? And if we say it, it could give us a clue for the hatch."

  "Ooh, like in some kind of cool spy movie?"

  "Less spy, more... drug dealer?"

  Silvia shrugged, continuing to glance around, "Hm... I prefer spies over drug dealers, but you do you."

  Her eyes soon fell onto the menu, lingering on it for a while, "Whoa, what the..?" she let out almost instinctively. In front of her eyes, the letters on the menu were moving and shifting around, "Can you see that as well?"

  Ryan looked at the menu, "See what?"

  "The letters are kind of moving? Not into words or anything, but they're moving. There's definitely something going on with that," she explained, trying to touch the board, "It's like there's... something hidden on the sign. If we can figure out what used to be written on the menu..."

  "Maybe we can also figure out what the secret drug code is."

  "... Do you really think it's drugs?" Silvia asked, and Ryan just shrugged.

  "Probably not. But who really knows? Modak, you got-"

  "Yup, just about," the orc said with a thumbs-up to the side, "Just have to enter a few more data points, and theeeen..."

  Pretty dramatically, Modak slammed the 'enter' key, carefully putting his arm back into a sling.

  "Wait, what? It's just been a couple of minutes," Silvia came over surprised, her eyes still glowing with 'insight'.

  "It actually wasn't that complicated a pattern, to be honest. I already analysed some dungeon construction patterns over the past couple of days because Ryan has been coming here more often, so I just had to enter some extra information into what I already figured out. Plus, I actually realized that there's probably a few words on this pamphlet that I could use as a baseline to decode everything, like the name of the park or the word 'Mascot'," Modak explained with a smug grin, "It's not perfect, and there's still some mistakes, but I should be able to fix up those kinks with some more data points. Keep taking pictures of any sort of writing whenever you're back so I can pin down the exact change patterns in the future."

  Ryan nodded, walking over to the Modak to also take a look at what he managed to figure out so far. On the screen, there was some writing displayed, and though some of the letters were still jumbled, and some of the words didn't make any sense in context, everything was a lot more readable now.

  "The mascot... home? Help them all to get the prize. Petting zoo... find the hidden... uh, that word's still too messed up. Where is it... ah, here! Food court... get the lucky numbers with your orders?" Ryan tried to figure out what that half-jumbled mess was saying. It was all sort of making sense, though it was still pretty cryptic. It was apparently just a short, simple introduction to each of the different zones for visitors of the park, accompanying the map itself.

  "So... while the park was active, there was some kind of raffle here? And now, if we figure out how to order food, we can find the code to the lock?" Silvia suggested. It seemed to make a lot of sense to Ryan, at least.

  He quickly walked back to the menu, snapped a photo, and then showed it to Modak. With his healthy hand, he quickly entered what it said into the makeshift decoder, and the trio watched as the somewhat unjumbled menu was spat back out at them. It was really just a regular pizza menu.

  "Is that it? How do we..?" Modak muttered, and Silvia quickly had an idea. She took over, entering the version of the menu that she saw through her insight skill.

  What it revealed was no longer a pizza menu, but rather, some non-pizza items that this place definitely didn't seem like it would have sold. Salads, soups, croissants, things like that.

  "Uh... should we try..?" Silvia turned her head to Ryan, who was already on his way back over to the stall. He once again placed the coin onto the counter, keeping his palm pressed onto it. Looking into the empty space behind the counter, he quickly said.

  "One large pepperoni pizza, please."

  Again, nothing happened. At least for a moment. But then, the coin started to fall apart into nothing, almost like monsters did. And what it left behind was a small piece of paper with a red 'X' on it. Ryan quickly pulled out the other coin that he had gathered earlier, and pushed it back onto the counter, "One... large mixed salad, please?"

  The coin fell apart again, and this time, it showed a different symbol, which did look quite familiar. It was one of the symbols from the lock.

  "Modak, Silvia, I think you guys just solved this zone's puzzle together."

  Check out the Patreon! Read up to 15 Chapters ahead!

  Join the Discord!