Chapter 1103 - 894: Maze

Here, there is a profound stillness, isolated from all external sounds by the heavy stone walls. Duke can clearly hear his own heartbeat and the extremely faint rustling of his robe as he moves. These sounds echo between the stone walls, stirring several layers of very light echoes, and then return to silence.

The air is permeated with a faint smell of aged stone, mixed with traces of metal rust and some indescribable, cool yet slightly sweet scent similar to ancient resin.

He lifts his head, his gaze piercing through the gray mist above. He can faintly see the outlines of several colossal stone arches high on the dome. The surfaces of these arches are also covered with luminous sigils, flickering through the mist like the breath of an ancient deity.

The entire corridor is wide enough for dozens of people to pass side by side, with an estimated width of at least three hundred meters. The stone walls extend into the distance on both sides, with equally wide intersections appearing every few miles, forming massive crossroads or radiating plazas at their junctions with the main passage.

Duke withdraws his gaze and raises his left hand to activate the Divine Revelation Mark.

A translucent light screen silently unfolds before him, and a concise textual explanation appears on its edge.

The third layer is a three-dimensional labyrinth, woven from numerous colossal stone corridors and countless intersections, akin in scale to an entire continent.

The concentration of free energy within the labyrinth is extremely high, but it also contains numerous areas of rule distortion and spatial instability nodes. Entering certain areas rashly may result in being randomly teleported to the other end of the labyrinth.

Furthermore, the labyrinth is inhabited by a myriad of mutant creatures born from rule distortions, with strengths ranging from Level 1 to Level 4. Among them, the most dangerous are labeled as Ancient Guardians, with their exact locations unknown.

Duke closes the Divine Revelation Mark and re-examines the boundless gray-white space before him.

A continent-level labyrinth, scattered keys, rule distortion areas, mutant creatures.

He quickly organizes this information in his mind, then refocuses his attention on the passage ahead.

Following the gray-white stone path beneath his feet, Duke walks forward for a distance and stops at an intersection.

This intersection is an irregular radiating shape, with several wide and narrow stone corridors extending in different directions, each leading straight into the unknown area shrouded in gray mist in the distance.

He stands in the center of the intersection, expanding his perception to confirm that there are no immediate threats nearby. Then, he raises his right hand and lightly pinches his five fingers in front of him.

A wisp of extremely faint magic power seeps from his fingertips, quickly condensing and shaping in the air to become a palm-sized, translucent little bird.

The Magic Eye, a foundational reconnaissance technique among Level 0 magic, is simple in construction, consumes very little, but requires the caster to constantly allocate a wisp of spiritual power to maintain shared vision.

In such a completely unfamiliar and dangerous environment, using the Magic Eye to scout the way is far safer than taking risks personally.

The bird shakes its wings in his palm, tilts its head to glance at him with those eyes formed purely of magic power, then takes off, flying vertically up the gray-white stone wall before him.

Duke attaches a wisp of spiritual power to the bird, sharing its vision.

The bird climbs upwards along the rough stone wall, the weathered cracks and luminous sigils appearing particularly clear in its close-up view. Those extremely fine, pale golden light threads gently flow along the cracks, with each flicker inciting a ripple of energy barely visible to the naked eye at the edges of the cracks.

The higher the bird flies, the denser the cracks on the stone wall become, and the faster those light strands move, as if the wall itself is gradually awakening as it ascends.

Upon reaching a certain height, the sigils on the stone wall begin to display some kind of pattern, no longer a disorderly array of lines but faintly pointing in the same direction.

Duke notices this detail through the bird’s vision, but before he can analyze it closely, the bird has already approached the gray mist enveloping the high dome.

He suspends the bird at the edge of the gray mist, carefully observing through the shared vision.

The gray mist stretches from the high point of the stone wall to the unseen depths of the dome, billowing slowly like half-settled mud.

The mist itself is not dense, revealing faint outlines of what appears to be an even higher stone wall behind it, yet those outlines remain blurry under the distortion of the mist.

He manipulates the bird to approach the gray mist cautiously. At the moment the bird’s beak is about to touch the mist, an invisible resistance suddenly emanates from the surface of the mist layer.

That is not a physical barrier, but more like a rejection on the level of rules.

The gray mist itself is not hard, but it refuses any foreign object from entering.

The bird’s beak pushes against the surface of the mist a few times, but the mist remains unmoved.

Duke increases the bird’s forward power, but this only results in a synchronized increase in the resistance, keeping the beak firmly outside of the mist layer, with not a single wisp of mist stirred.

He abandons the attempt to break through head-on, maneuvering the bird to fly horizontally along the edge of the gray mist, trying to find a gap between the stone wall and the mist.

The little bird flies for a long distance along the boundary of the gray mist, but no matter which stone corridor it flies above, the gray mist consistently shrouds the high dome tightly, like a layer of eternal, unbroken seal.