Chapter 54: Skipping the Trap Corridors

Floor Eight of the Abyssal Crypt was known as the Corridor of Nine Tribulations.

Grand Elder Moros wiped stinging sweat from his eyes. Behind him, two hundred and sixty imperial spellblades stood in formation, spirit barriers humming.

The corridor before them stretched five hundred yards into the earth.

Lining both walls were nine colossal bronze dragon braziers. From each dragon's maw roared a pillar of white-hot fire—the legendary Five-Thousand-Year Primordial Sun-Flame.

The heat was intense enough to turn iron weapons to slag within seconds.

Above the first brazier, an ancient stone face carved in the likeness of the First Emperor glowered down upon the intruders. Its hollow eyes crackled with golden lightning, and its lips parted to emit a slow, booming voice that shook the bedrock:

"HEAR YE, MORTAL TRESPASSERS... NINE THOUSAND CYCLES AGO, I, EMPEROR WU, GAZED UPON THE FIRMAMENT AND CONTEMPLATED THE DUALITY OF EMBER AND ASH..."

【Target: Nine Dragon Flame Puzzles】 【Grade: 5,000-Year Primordial Sealing Array】 【Danger Level: Sovereign Incineration】 【Inspector Note: A tedious, lethal riddle corridor built by an ancient emperor with too much free time. One wrong syllable results in instant vaporization.】

"Silence! Form the divination circle!" Moros shouted frantically to his alchemists. "Unroll the imperial astronomical charts!"

Twelve battle-alchemists dropped to their knees, spreading parchment across the stone floor.

"Grand Elder!" an alchemist cried out in panic. "The ancient texts say this corridor contains seventy-two interlocking celestial riddles! We must calculate the lunar trigram coordinates for each flame in sequence!"

"How long will the calculations take?" Moros demanded, feeling the heat blistering his skin.

"At least three days, Grand Elder!" the alchemist wailed. "And if we make a single error in the stanzas, the Primordial Sun-Flame will engulf the entire corridor in soul-melting plasma!"

Above them, the giant stone face droned on at a agonizingly sluggish pace:

"...AND IN THE FOURTEENTH YEAR OF MY REIGN, AS THE CELESTIAL COMET CLEAVED THE NORTHERN HORIZON, I DECREED THAT ALL TRUTH MUST BE TESTED THROUGH THE PURIFYING TRIBULATION OF THE NINE EMBERS..."

Moros clenched his fists, staring down the lethal inferno.

"Three days of calculations," Moros whispered, dread knotting his stomach. "Our cooling talismans will expire in twenty minutes. We are trapped."

Two hundred miles away, under a peaceful afternoon sky, Felix Vance let out a loud, miserable groan.

He lay horizontal in his Zero-Gravity Recliner on the porch of Solitude Spire.

His bare feet were propped up on the cedar railing, toes wriggling in the mild sixty-nine-degree breeze generated by the Sun-Lotus Cabbage.

Down in the clover, the Thunder Gryphon was snoring rhythmically, its golden tail swatting away stray mountain flies.

On the railing, Barnaby the clockwork owl stood rigidly, his copper-tipped beak sealed tight by the hand-carved oak bottle cork and copper penny. His internal gears clicked in quiet protest as he stared at the glowing slate in Felix's hands.

Inside the quiet kitchen, the short front leg of the pine table rested firmly on Grandmaster Vivienne’s Sovereign Heart Seal. Underneath the jade block, the hidden glyph the ancient jade seal remained face down against the floorboards, keeping everything level.

And inside Felix's chest, the 2.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial core hummed with steady, comfortable gravity.

Felix held the brass-cased AetherDeck in both hands, glaring at the obsidian display with pure, unadulterated gamer fury.

On the screen, Catacomb Crawler v2.0 had loaded Floor Eight.

His tiny 8-bit knight stood at the beginning of a narrow purple corridor lined with nine flaming torch sprites.

Hovering over the middle of the screen was a massive dialogue box featuring a low-resolution pixel portrait of an old bearded emperor. A slow text crawl was creeping across the bottom of the box, one letter at a time:

Felix watched the text crawl.

H... E... A... R... Y... E...

His eye began to twitch.

"One character per second?" Felix whispered, his voice rising in disbelief. "Twelve minutes of an unskippable monologue from an old guy with a pixel beard before a basic torch puzzle?"

He rubbed his temples, feeling his brain cells melting from boredom.

"I hate lore dumps," Felix muttered. "I hate unskippable cutscenes. I hate games that make you read eighty pages of fake history just to open a wooden door. I have an afternoon nap scheduled in twenty minutes."

Felix squinted at the top-right corner of the dialogue frame.

There, almost invisible against the dark purple border, sat a tiny, semi-transparent button: [>> SKIP DIALOGUE].

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Oh, thank god," Felix breathed. "The developers aren't complete monsters."

Without a second thought, Felix brought his right thumb down onto the skip button.

TAP. TAP. TAP.

He mashed the glass three times in rapid succession.

The dialogue box vanished in a puff of gray pixels, cutting the old emperor’s speech off mid-vowel.

Now, only the puzzle remained.

Nine flaming torch sprites sat on the screen, each marked with an obscure mathematical rune. Below the torches was a complicated riddle menu asking the player to arrange the spiritual frequencies of heaven and earth.

Felix didn't even read the riddle.

"Why do math in a video game?" Felix scoffed. "Puzzles in action games are just filler."

He tapped the screen with his index finger.

He dragged the master torch icon across the interface, drawing a single, dismissive line across all nine braziers.

Then, using the touchscreen's multi-touch gesture, he swiped all nine flame toggles straight into the 'OFF' position.

SWIPE.

Felix smiled, resting his chin against his chest. "There. Done. No math required."

Two hundred miles away, deep on Floor Eight, reality suffered a sudden shock.

The giant stone face of Emperor Wu was still booming with pompous imperial grandeur:

"...AND BY MY DIVINE WILL, THE FIRES OF TRIBULATION SHALL FOREVER CONSUME ALL THOSE WHO LACK THE WISDOM OF THE SEVENTY-TWO—"

CLACK.

The stone face’s jaw snapped shut with the violent force of a slamming steel trapdoor.

A sound like a scratched vinyl record echoed down the five-hundred-yard corridor.

The golden lightning in the stone face's eyes flickered twice, then extinguished completely, leaving behind dull, lifeless gray granite.

At the exact same instant, an invisible, cosmic shockwave swept through the corridor.

It didn't shatter the walls or blast the ceiling.

It was a gentle, terrifying gust of cool spring air that smelled faintly of sweet honey cabbage.

The nine pillars of white-hot Primordial Sun-Flame, which had burned uninterrupted for five thousand years since the dawn of the First Epoch, let out a collective, pathetic sound:

Pffft.

All nine braziers went dark simultaneously.

Zero sparks remained. Not even a wisp of smoke drifted from the bronze dragon maws.

The blistering heat vanished in half a second, replaced by a refreshing, breezy coolness.

The cracked, lava-scorched floor tiles smoothed out into a pristine highway of cool golden marble, gleaming brightly under a soft, soothing ambient light.

Grand Elder Moros stood frozen mid-stride.

His alchemists remained kneeling on the floor. The cavern went deathly quiet.

"The... the fire?" an alchemist squeaked, staring at his useless charts. "Where did the Primordial Sun-Flame go?"

Moros slowly walked forward, his boots clicking against the cool golden marble.

He reached out a trembling hand and touched the rim of the nearest dragon brazier.

It was completely cold in fact, it was slightly cool to the touch, like river stone.

Moros’s knees buckled. He collapsed onto the golden tiles in disbelief.

"The First Emperor's residual will..." Moros whispered, tears of unadulterated awe spilling down his wrinkled face. "The Emperor was reciting his eternal decree... and the Senior Ancestor told him to shut his mouth!"

The spellblades gasped, terrified by the sacrilege, yet unable to deny what their eyes saw.

"He skipped it!" Moros cried out, slamming his palms against the marble floor. "The supreme master deemed five thousand years of imperial wisdom to be nothing more than tedious babble! With a mere wave of his sleeve, he blew out the Primordial Sun-Flames like birthday candles and paved a golden highway for our boots!"

Moros raised his hands to the ceiling, weeping in ecstatic worship.

"The Dao of Eternal Brevity!" Moros shouted. "The supreme entity cares not for mortal riddles or pretentious speeches! He desires only forward progress! Praise the Master of the Golden Path!"

Two hundred and sixty spellblades dropped to their knees, their armor ringing against the marble as they cheered.

"Praise the Master of the Golden Path!"

Back on Solitude Spire, Lyra Ashford stood trembling beside Felix's chair.

She felt the spatial ripple from his dense rocky core. It was a localized pulse that flattened dimensional wrinkles two hundred miles away.

Lyra looked down at the AetherDeck screen.

On the glass display, the dark corridor was now rendered in bright gold pixels, labeled: [CORRIDOR CLEARED - 0 SECONDS].

He... he skipped the ancient imperial trial, Lyra thought, her mind reeling in dizzying circles.

Emperor Wu was a legendary conqueror whose wisdom baffled the greatest sages of the First Epoch. Yet to Senior Brother, that ten-thousand-year heritage was merely an annoyance! He dismissed an emperor's soul with a flick of his finger, refusing to waste a single breath on mortal pretension!

She watched Felix casually take a sip of cold jasmine tea.* The Dao of Inaction does not entertain foolish words!* Lyra realized, shivering with boundless reverence. True power does not debate. True power does not calculate. True power simply walks through the fire, and the fire chooses to die rather than offend his presence!

On the screen, Felix’s 8-bit knight trotted casually down the golden corridor, bypassing all nine extinguished braziers without losing a single point of health.

A victory banner flashed:

Felix tapped [PROCEED TO FLOOR 9].

The screen shifted, loading a narrow dungeon corridor packed with spike traps, swinging axes, and patrol gargoyles.

"More walking?" Felix muttered, shaking his head. "Walking down hallways is not content. That is just padding."

He opened his bag menu and pulled out two [Fast-Travel Portal Stones].

"I will just place one stone at the entrance and one at the exit," Felix said. "Skip the whole hallway."

He dragged Portal A to the start of the hall and flicked Portal B toward the exit. But his thumb slipped on the glass screen.

Portal B snapped right above Portal A, facing it directly.

BZZZZT!

A bright blue spark flashed across the screen.

"Classic collision bug," Felix laughed softly. "The portals are facing each other. An infinite falling loop."

Two hundred miles below, Floor Nine collapsed into spatial comedy.

A massive stone gargoyle lunged forward to defend the hallway, only to step squarely into Portal A on the floor.

WHOOSH!

The gargoyle shot out of Portal B on the ceiling, fell straight back into Portal A, and popped out of Portal B again. Within five seconds, the beast was trapped in a continuous vertical loop, screaming in bewildered terror as it plummeted at terminal velocity forever.

Next, a squad of dungeon skeletons rattled forward with rusty broadswords.

Felix sighed, broke off a pinch of breadcrumb from his red bean bun, and tapped it onto the glass.

"Eat some crumbs and go away," Felix murmured.

The touch registered on the screen as a high-priority aggro lure: [Item: Stale Pastry Crumb].

The skeleton squad immediately halted. Their pathfinding AI scrambled. Forgetting all ancient hatred, the skeletons lowered their swords, turned around in perfect unison, and peacefully waddled into a side storage closet like baby ducks following their mother.

Grand Elder Moros and his spellblades reached Floor Nine moments later, their jaws dropping in utter reverence.

"Behold!" Moros wept, falling to his knees before the endless portal loop. "The Samsara Gate of Infinite Falling! And the Dao of Breadcrumb Compassion! The Senior Sovereign bends space and tames undead horrors with mere morsels of bread!"

Back on the porch, Felix yawned and tapped the Floor Ten stairwell.

"Buggy dungeon crawler," Felix whispered, closing his eyes. "At least Floor Ten is the boss. Then I can finally nap."