SSS Ranked Awakening: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Chapter 569: The Uncounted Passage

Leon worked the fingers of his left hand once. The arm answered without pain or delay.

The Burden of Possession had been punishing only while its law remained attached to him. Once the band opened, the suppression ended and his regeneration did what it had done after far worse injuries. The strain was gone. His mana reserve was not instantly full, but it continued rising with every passing minute.

Under better conditions, he still would have found a quiet place and absorbed the two Epic crystals before following anything this suspicious.

The labyrinth made that a bad choice.

Every cleared room could cause the maze to rearrange itself, and the black fragments in his storage were pulling toward the unmarked passage more strongly than before.

This was the first useful trail he had found. The sealed door had shown itself inside a mirror. The fragments had reacted to a pulse from somewhere across the maze. Now, for once, they were leading him toward a place he could reach.

If he backed off to rest, the labyrinth might shift before he returned. He would still have two puzzle pieces afterward, but the board they belonged to could be gone.

He was physically whole, alert, and unwilling to let the trail disappear.

Leon entered the dark.

As soon as he passed beneath the arch, the opening closed behind him. He sensed it more clearly than he saw it: the space at his back changed, and solid stone replaced the way out.

The Tower gave him no notification.

That was wrong enough on its own. It announced claimed treasure. It announced restraints locking around his wrist. Usually, it found something to say about everything.

Here, it remained silent.

The lack of a message felt louder than one.

Light barely survived inside the passage.

A few steps in, Leon summoned a small flame over his palm to test the darkness. The fire illuminated his hand and a narrow section of floor, then its glow faded away long before it should have. Holy energy reached no farther. Mana met the same limit.

The blackness did not seem to repel the light. It allowed the glow to travel a short distance, then took the rest into itself.

His enhanced senses still worked beyond what his eyes could manage. Spatial perception outlined the corridor clearly enough, so he could continue without stumbling. Even then, losing the simple assurance of sight bothered him more than he would have guessed.

His spatial perception functioning at all was the first odd part.

It spread down the passage and gave him an orderly answer. The corridor ran straight ahead. It had a definite length. Its far end sat at a fixed, measurable distance.

Several minutes of walking revealed the second problem.

That far end remained exactly where it had been when he entered.

Leon reduced his pace.

He had followed a straight route without a single branch or turn. His perception still reported a finite corridor with an endpoint ahead, but the distance to it had not decreased.

He continued for another stretch while tracking it carefully.

Nothing changed.

The path was straight.

The end was finite.

And it never came any closer.

Leon drew his sword. At shoulder height, he carved a shallow diagonal line into the wall on his left, leaving a clean scar in the stone. Then he carried on.

Minutes later, the same mark appeared ahead of him.

He had not turned around.

His perception had confirmed a straight path with every step, yet the diagonal cut he had left behind now waited in front of him on the same left-hand wall. It matched exactly.

Leon stopped beside it.

The answer became obvious.

The passage was looping.

Its far end curved back into its beginning, so moving forward would always bring him around to the place where he had started.

A chill ran over his skin, mostly because his senses had never given him false information. The corridor truly was straight. It truly had a finite length. Space had simply been folded around and joined to itself so neatly that his perception read the whole thing as one continuous line.

Leon extended Void Dominion and searched for the join.

There.

A faint wound in space marked the place where two sections had been fused together.

He tried to pull the seam open.

The attempt stopped against the same absolute resistance he had encountered at the edge of the floor. His authority could identify the flaw, but the Tower’s authority sat above his. Knowing where the join was did not give him the power to break it.

That figured.

A loop would hardly count as a puzzle if every challenger could cut through it. The Tower had placed the trap beyond his ability to overpower, just as it had done with the outer walls.

He would need to solve it properly.

The fragments shifted while he was still considering the problem.

Leon removed both from storage and placed them in his open hand. The two black slivers weighed nothing and swallowed the little light that reached them.

At once, they began pulling.

One angled toward the wall in front of him. The other leaned back along the route he had taken.

By themselves, they pointed in opposite directions.

He brought their broken sides together. Once they settled into the larger, unfinished shape, the conflict vanished. The joined fragments tilted as one and drew his hand toward a single place on the otherwise smooth wall.

Leon followed the pull.

At the indicated point, the stone held a flaw so small it almost did not exist. A hair-thin imperfection interrupted the seamless surface. Without the fragments, he could have walked past it a thousand times and never noticed.

It marked the join in the loop.

Nothing visible should have revealed it, but the fragments had found it immediately.

Leon studied the pieces, and their purpose began to make more sense.

They were not only parts of some key or seal.

They also served as guides.

The fragments could locate hidden spaces and seams that the Tower’s interface refused to recognize. Whatever kept the pieces concealed from the Cosmic System appeared to hide those flaws as well, but the fragments remained able to detect them.

Leon continued toward the seam.

The corridor started working harder to stop him.

Every new loop carried a different trick, each one less reliable than the last. The mark from his sword began changing places. Though he had cut it into the left wall, it later appeared on the right. On another circuit, it waited on the ceiling. After that, he found it low beside the floor.

It remained the same diagonal scar each time. Only its location changed.

The corridor’s length also refused to stay stable. One circuit stretched farther than the last. The next became shorter. The supposed fixed distance to the ”end” shifted quietly with every pass until he could no longer use it to judge direction.

Then he heard footsteps coming from ahead.

They matched his own pace exactly, echoing toward him from the direction he was travelling, as if someone farther along the passage were walking in perfect rhythm with him.

On one circuit, Leon rounded a bend and saw a figure far down the corridor.

It was walking away from him.

The shape matched his body, and its stride matched his. As Leon advanced, it retreated into the black at the same speed.

He stopped.

The distant figure stopped as well.

Leon took one step.

It did the same.

His spatial perception insisted that the figure stood ahead of him inside the passage, even though nobody else had entered.

The explanation came after a moment.

The loop had folded his line of sight back across his own route.

He was not watching a duplicate.

He was seeing himself one circuit farther ahead, walking across the same stone under his feet.

Trying to catch the figure would only leave him chasing his own back forever.

Leon allowed it to vanish into the darkness.

Then he ignored what the corridor showed him and placed his trust in the fragments.