Chapter 86: Fragments of the Puzzle

  Emilia studied the doors, weighing the options before her. The worst part was that the symbols engraved on them had nothing in common with the Heavenly language and showed no visible mana at all.

  Time passed slowly. Several people tried their luck, each with different, often interesting ideas. In the end, however, only five participants remained. One of them, a boy who kept glancing ahead as if searching for a path forward, finally lost his patience and approached the doors.

  He began rotating them, and it soon became clear that he had grasped the concept of identical pairs. He arranged the doors two by two, and before long, twenty doors formed a long, almost straight line. When the last door clicked into place, ten rewards fell down, one for each pair of doors.

  Emilia, who had been watching closely, stepped up to Elion.

  "Brother Elion, I have an idea. Let’s not waste time and instead continue the sequence he started."

  Elion narrowed his eyes and looked at her suspiciously.

  "But who finishes the sequence first? If I finish it, won’t you take advantage of my doors and make the longest chain? He’ll have twenty doors," Elion pointed at the boy collecting his rewards, "I’ll have forty, and you’ll end up with sixty combinations."

  "Not necessarily. We can do it in parts. For example, I’ll place ten first, then you place ten. I’ll get the smaller reward for the first ten. After that, we add five more each—this time you wait, and I’ll have more combinations. And at the end, when we reach eighteen, we can try to close each door together at the exact same moment. Who knows, maybe the challenge can recognize that."

  Elion thought for a moment while Emilia waited impatiently.

  "Brother Elion, look—if we extend his line to the east and west, but deviate by forty-five degrees at the twelfth and sixteenth doors, we can reach the edge of the field of doors and close the sequence so no one else can continue it. It will start at one end of the field and reach the other. But we have to hurry—someone else might think of it before us."

  Elion still hesitated.

  "If we wait for someone else to extend the line, won’t we be able to take advantage of it and make an even longer combination?" he asked, watching the remaining participants.

  "Not if they also get the idea to close the line at both ends!"

  Elion cast a calculating look over the field of doors, rapidly running through possible sequences in his head. In the end, he sighed and spoke.

  "Fine, Emilia. Even though you’re sponsored by the hunters, you’re still close to the Church. Maybe if things had gone differently, you’d be here ten years from now, sponsored by the Church instead. Let’s try to close the first sequence of ten doors at the same time. If it works and we get similar rewards, then we can try the same thing at nineteen doors."

  "And why not twenty?" she asked.

  "So the temptation isn’t too great for one of us to finish the entire sequence early. I trust you, but not that much. Besides, this is just the first trial. I don’t think the rewards will be big enough to justify standing here for hours waiting for something to happen."

  Emilia quickly agreed. After settling the details, the two of them ran toward the doors. They began rotating them rapidly, and once each had set up ten doors, they gave the signal.

  "Three… two… one… now!"

  Together, they activated their positions.

  When they checked their rewards, they turned out to be quite similar. Each of them received a handful of first-level monster cores, two mana crystals, and portions of the space’s unique herbs—the very ones they had needed to pay for entry.

  Emilia and Elion smiled triumphantly and continued arranging more doors. Almost immediately, they set several of them at an angle and began turning toward the edge of the field. They worked without stopping for even a second, and soon the other three youths started exchanging glances.

  One of them couldn’t take it anymore and dashed toward Emilia’s line, which was the shorter one.

  But Emilia had trained for a terrifyingly long time with Captain Cassian, and after that she had fought for her life alongside the hunters. She instantly activated her mana and, with full force, began arranging the door. Elion also sped up, and before long, the two of them were done.

  For their competitor to succeed, he would have had to get ahead of Emilia and “steal” one of her doors, preventing her from reaching the end. On top of that, he needed to do it at a key position, so she wouldn’t be able to use another branch.

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  But Emilia shocked everyone with her speed, and their rival’s plan failed!

  After extending the line, they simultaneously closed the chain of nineteen doors each, together with the twenty doors of the first participant.

  This time, the reward was significantly larger. There were five mana crystals, a handful of monster cores, an even greater quantity of herbs, and three strange-looking seals. Emilia immediately examined them with her magical vision and saw the stable mana within them.

  These are some kind of keys, she realized at once. Seals with formations were often used as keys to open documents, safes, and other protected places. Or maybe they’re entrances to some special formation, she thought next. Sometimes formations also used different keys to distinguish who they affected and how.

  After using the final twentieth door, linking it with the doors of the previous participants, Emilia gained another handful of herbs and hurried forward.

  Soon, they found themselves in a new hall, covered in artificial stars. Emilia stared at them for a long time, and then her gaze filled with awe.

  Those are enormous magical crystals growing directly from the walls. How expensive must they be? If I managed to take even a single one, wouldn’t I earn more than everything else I’ll gain here? she wondered.

  Elion, who was slower, stood beside her, breathing heavily. “Emilia, what are those seals for?” he asked.

  She explained her theory—that they were keys, or even items recognized by the formation itself.

  “Thank you for sharing information so freely with me,” he said quickly, in a formal tone.

  “Hahaha… if Zevan were here, he’d ruffle my hair and scold me for not managing to swindle you out of a few monster cores. He’d say I’d never become an ‘honest’ hunter.”

  “But I thought hunters were honest and respected people!”

  “Hahaha… not exactly, not exactly…” she decided not to explain further. After all, she was an honored member of the hunters, and there was no need to go into details about certain more… peculiar groups.

  Far from everyone worked diligently. Many hunters spent their money on alcohol and easy pleasures, and when the money ran out, they sometimes fell into debt, and things could easily spiral out of control.

  The two continued along the path, lit by strange spiritual lamps. They walked through something like a thin mist, but at one point Emilia realized it was pure magical energy. It flowed out of the lamps and slowly drifted somewhere ahead.

  They quickened their pace, and as if guided by that energy, they arrived at a multitude of enclosed gardens.

  Emilia’s gaze swept over the endless, neatly arranged rows of priceless herbs, clusters of magical trees, and mushrooms hidden in various places.

  Countless magical insects helped the mushrooms grow strong, living in symbiosis with their auras. Each insect had its own role, and at times the herbs themselves lazily opened their leaves and snapped up one of the insects.

  Emilia watched as the mist, made of pure mana particles, slowly drifted between the plants, and everything flourished within this botanical paradise.

  At regular intervals, strange crystalline water flowed in through a network of silver pipes, irrigating the vegetation. Various large beings worked the garden beds, and the biggest and most fearsome among them guarded the entrance.

  Emilia noticed some of the participants approaching the large beings and exchanging vast quantities of mana crystals for certain herbs.

  Elion stepped closer and whispered so only Emilia could hear him.

  “All kinds of herbs are grown here, and the big ones sometimes even make medicinal pills from them. But the most important thing is that the super-rare herbs that allow a person to advance from zero to first level grow here!”

  Emilia immediately gasped and hurriedly covered her mouth with her hand. A fierce desire burned in her eyes, which now glowed with a strange light. She knew very well what kind of herbs those were.

  Countless people with awakened mana tried to break through and become first-level mages. Yet only a small fraction succeeded, and only after many years of endless struggle and at the cost of innumerable magical treasures.

  But everyone knew that herbs existed whose mana was so gentle and yet so dense that anyone standing at the very edge of zero level could cross the barrier in a single leap, aided by the herb’s soft mana. In doing so, they would be reborn, like the mythical fish that leapt beneath the divine waterfall and became the first river dragon.

  Those herbs, however, had long since stopped growing in ordinary forests, except perhaps in extremely rare cases, deep within the most remote woods and mountains.

  For centuries, even millennia, countless mages searched for such herbs to continue their growth toward the next level of the magical arts.

  Especially after humanity uncovered the secrets of the higher levels of magic, many mages gained the ability to fly, using all kinds of methods. They had traveled across the entire world, developing mysterious, time-lost forbidden techniques that allowed them to detect such herbs from kilometers away.

  Thus, over the past thousands of years, they had scoured and harvested every ancient herb, practically destroying the future of the magical arts.

  Because of this, many mythical heroes, with the aid of the gods, created special places with special conditions to preserve these herbs for future generations. This relatively small private space was one of those thousands of places where such herbs were safeguarded.

  Every ten years, twenty herbs could be purchased at the cost of an enormous amount of magical energy, mostly in the form of mana crystals. That energy would then be used to cultivate more herbs, thus closing the cycle.

  Access to these spaces was restricted, and the price was staggering. As a result, only the strongest and wealthiest could afford it. This allowed those with wealth and power to preserve their strength, and often they were the only ones with enough financial resources to buy the herbs.

  Perhaps two or three herbs were purchased by various merchants and guilds, but that wasn’t a problem, since the world depended on their services.

  Emilia let out a heavy sigh. She would never be able to afford the steep price of those herbs and would have to look for an alternative solution.

  “Sometimes, some of the trials also reward herbs like those,” Elion said dreamily, his gaze never stopping as it wandered among the rows of greenery.

  He, however, was lucky. The Church, as well as the military, had their own ways of acquiring such herbs. On top of that, they possessed alchemists capable of turning a single herb into three to five pills, each offering a full ninety percent chance of success.