Floor Eight of the Abyssal Crypt was known as the Corridor of Nine Tribulations.
Grand Elder Moros wiped stinging sweat from his eyes, his crimson robes clinging to his skin in the suffocating heat. Behind him, two hundred and sixty imperial spellblades stood in formation, spirit barriers humming at maximum output.
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. Their hands shook so violently they could barely hold their ink brushes.
"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 black rubber laboratory stopper. 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, perfectly 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."
In the gaming world, forcing a player to sit through a twelve-minute unskippable dialogue crawl was classified as a war crime.
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]`.
"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 first word of the riddle.
"Why would I do high school algebra in a video game?" Felix scoffed. "Puzzles in action games are just filler to pad out playtime."
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 in the subterranean darkness of Floor Eight, reality suffered a sudden cardiac arrest.
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, their ink brushes dripping black ink onto blank parchment.
The silence in the cavern was deafening.
"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, clutching his chest as he hyperventilated.
"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 the sunlit porch of Solitude Spire, Lyra Ashford stood trembling beside Felix's chair.
She had felt the spatial ripple.
The 2.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial core in Felix's chest had emitted a sudden, sharp micro-gravitational pulse—a localized warp that flattened dimensional wrinkles across a two-hundred-mile vector.
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 smiled, thoroughly pleased with the result.
"Now that's what I call quality-of-life features," Felix said, setting his empty teacup down on the lacquer tray. "Every game needs a skip button for puzzle sections. If I wanted to do math, I'd get a desk job."
Barnaby clicked his brass feathers on the railing, nodding his copper-tipped beak in full mechanical agreement.
Down in the yard, the Thunder Gryphon let out a long, contented snort, stretching its golden wings before falling back asleep in the clover.
Felix leaned back into the plush ergonomic mesh of his Zero-Gravity Recliner, his thumb flicking the virtual D-pad.
The 8-bit knight marched through the archway, descending the stairs into Floor Nine.
"Floor Nine," Felix murmured, pulling his straw hat back over his eyes. "Just one more floor before the boss chamber and my thousand crystals. I hope the Floor Ten boss doesn't give a long speech. I really want to take my nap."