I stuff my mouth with the most delicious piece of brick. Sinking my teeth in it as if my life depends on it, because it does. My jaw hurts from trying to separate the pieces for me to swallow, but before I notice I have finished it all. With a little more of my faculties back, I look around.

I’m still hungry, but I shouldn’t eat anymore for at least a couple of hours. Not after so long on an empty stomach. Do the same rules of physiology still apply after the system’s interference? I could feel within myself that some changes were taking place that shouldn’t be possible on a biochemical level if we limited ourselves to the periodic table.

The system bridged a lot of gaps and threw a lot of rules out of the window. Identifying the result of my body gaining new capabilities and what was the interference from the system, the resources, Aether, or a change to my body was hard. I am still inexperienced in the ways of the system.

But I will learn in time. Hell, half the reason I chose this class was because of my desire to learn. Creating was nice and all, but I lacked knowledge of the system the most and any chance of acquiring more is critical.

I have a feeling that this class may even be a more suitable class for me long term, though what form it will take at higher levels is still unknown.

With my stomach filled for the moment, I make use of my returned senses and behold the huge room. Rough yellowish stone like the place I arrived here, but with a much higher ceiling, a dome 30 meters high. I take in the sights guessing that my senses will fade when I leave this place.

I make use of the time before my next meal. Too tired to continue for the moment, I start meditating. Within me, everything is still as out of reach as in the moments after I left the first chamber.

The only thing that returned are my senses. Miffed but not letting go of the opportunity, I continue trying to extend my understanding of Vigor, and eventually the equivalent of Health and Mana. They have been stubborn and the dulled proprioception while running in the maze didn’t help matters as well, but I was making progress, ohh so slowly, but progress nonetheless.

But I have a feeling that this place was uniquely suited for learning about those resources. Perhaps it’s not the goal of the trial, but even if I didn’t succeed on the first try, I can still improve, slowly chipping away at the challenge.

Aether begins to spin around me. This time I don’t forcefully attribute anything to it. Even doing it this way, following the natural flows of my Aether, I’m left with the same if not a stronger feeling compared to the first time I used Aether. Successfully detoxed from the rough handling of Aether my first attempts have been, I only nudge it slightly.

The certainty that filled me the first couple of times I used my Aether is absent which is probably a good thing. Nothing good could come from constantly being in a state of surety about everything. I need to grow, learn, adapt, look for how to improve. If I had all the answers already, I would have already accomplished all I desire before lunch.

I relish in the discovery, in the struggle, in the progress and the feeling of achievement that investing my time on something brings. For years I have just gone about my business over the days and weeks without thinking about it much. I was proud of what I had done, but I also settled on the course with little forethought about the results, without looking at it to see if I could do it better. My shortcomings seem painfully obvious now, even considering that I was less experienced back then.

I breathe in again and let go of the frustration trying to creep in. It is a lesson and the best I can hope for is to learn from it and not repeat it in the future. I run over what I know of this labyrinth. Looking at the map I started to form, a close glance shows me something I hadn’t expected.

There is a pattern to it. If I assume that the roughly circular shape forming delineates the limits and that I won’t have to deal with more than the 3 levels I have discovered till now, the corridors meandering through the empty space on the map cover about 70 percent of the volume.

So I have explored roughly a third of the place. A closer look at the map also makes it obvious now that there must be something at the center. Though in the last few days I heavily tended to the outside of the circle. It looks pretty clear to me that there must be something at the center.

Though I didn’t waste any time. I managed to push through the lack of food further than virtually anyone else could. I have yet to start losing much muscle mass, and I know that as long as I still have some fat it will continue to be the case. My exertions start to catch up with me, so I lay back just for a moment for a quick nap and the world is no more.

------------------

I open my eyes, feeling a knot in my shoulder. Damn, I fell asleep in a very awkward position. Next time I will plan it better. Still with no clock, and the only source of light now the constant faint glow above me, I get up and stretch for a few minutes to get rid of the soreness that accumulated from the night of sleep.

Though the pain is more reflex than real damage to my body. The immense stat pool the system helped me attain is doing wonders.

Expecting to get 6 more loaves of bread, one for each of the other puzzles I found, I go around unlocking so I can get something to eat. After the third unlock, I stop and head back to the table to eat the two loaves.

As I expected, my senses are muted again as soon as I leave the central formation. Except this time every single sense is completely gone. Well, no great loss there considering how muted they were.

Even the control over vigor seems to be slightly affected, but it should be good practice, right?

I eat a hearty breakfast to replenish myself. After so long without food, the sight of food alone was enough to send my stomach all over the place, like a washing machine with a very unbalanced load. I could hold out a while longer, but so close to the stuff of life, inches away from nourishment, my body reacted like a ravenous beast and I eat both of the round loaves of bread I unlocked.

Each about the size of my palm, they probably had about the number of calories I spend in a day with light activity. If I’m correct in my assumptions, there were 18 in total. Rationing one per day I still have 15 days left.

And so I spend the next few days. I explore every single inch of the place over 12 more days. With a greater understanding of the logic of the maze and some forethought, I cover more ground with less overlap in my trips around the place.

I continue putting one foot in front of the other as my new senses perfectly match the size of my inner world and stop there. I couldn’t confirm it for obvious reasons, but I knew it in my gut they would match perfectly down to the millimeter.

No idea why, but it must have something to do with my mental image about the proprioception of my body, and the domain around me. Perhaps there is more to this inner world than I first thought.

I go back to the center, and finally, unlock the last of the pieces of bread. Like all others, it just waits for me in the middle of the table. It may be teleported there for all I know. Three loaves of bread left. As I sit, I look over them and I change my plans. I split them in half, and slowly eat one of the pieces.

It is bland, sure, but I couldn’t care less. I not only want to complete this trial, but I want to do well and if I didn’t manage to achieve the maximum result, whatever that was, perhaps I could gain something else from it.

My fine control over vigor was improving and I was making progress even with the muted feeling the very environment is trying to impose on me. For the briefest of moments, I can use it like stamina and infuse my body as I do with mana with the power that fills me nothing to joke about.

The Health and Mana equivalents are still elusive but there is something there, I’m sure of it. I am not clear on how useful it will be, but I left that question to the wayside and continue eating.

Wiping my mouth after finishing my meal, I sit and start to meditate. I wish to continue my work to unlock the other two resources, but I still feel there was a deeper level to the current puzzles. Simple math dictates that with a couple of images and an understanding of the logic behind them you could do this by trial and error and unlock all 18 puzzles. But if that was all, it seem too easy. An hour goes by with thought after thought coming and fading as I run through the possibilities in my head.

I don’t find anything new by going over the current information, so the next step is to go gather more.

Running through the entire labyrinth again is obviously out of the picture, so I have to concentrate my efforts on specific places. The obvious choices are this chamber, the initial room, and the 36 places where I found the symbols on the walls.

Half of them are copies of each other, something I only discovered at the eleventh site, it being a copy of the third. They could however be ever so slightly different from each other and I simply didn’t notice the difference or I missed something else.

Already in one of the places I decide needs a closer look, I start. I walk to the edge and start circling it. One step, stop and switch between both my perception fields, just in case. So far the only difference between them I that the one not ‘gifted’ by the system is a lot better. Not in size, as they are the same now, but in another very important aspect, how sharp the ‘image’ is, or what the smallest detail I can make out is.

Reflexively, I put my hand on my forehead. The dull and faint headache I was expecting to find myself with is gone. It has slowly faded over the days as I trained here, but it is completely gone. Good riddance. Running the perception field is very useful, but focusing too hard on it for long periods was painful.

With each step, I look behind the walls, above the ceiling and under the ground, but all I sense is solid stone, like I was in the middle of a mountain or deep underground. I eve put my body against the wall and lay on the floor to get another few inches of range, but neither action brings any new information. If I had access to my book I’m certain I would be able to achieve more or at least do it faster.

Shaking my head, I take another step. I go over every inch of the mechanism behind the puzzle on the wall, the corridors. I search everything exhaustively and nothing stands out to me. So I start to make my way to the center. It was the obvious place to find anything. I sit in the middle and start to go over every inch, with an even closer look if compared to my spin around the chamber.

The table. A smooth and thick stone sitting atop a 3 foot by 2-foot cylinder in an imposing if simple image.

My eyes can’t see anything outside the ordinary, and a vague look with the perception field also doesn’t reveal anything new, but a deep focused scan reveals small internal discrepancies.

Inside of it, I notice a slight difference in texture, something I didn’t notice on the first day before my improvements in the ‘resolution’ of my sense, but I do so now and after knowing it was there I cannot ignore it. There is no difference in density of the material, the only thing different is the ‘flavor’. Maybe the color is different, but I wouldn’t know without breaking the table, which sounds like a bad idea.

I try to trace it along with the table, but I fail miserably for a few minutes. Instead of continuing to bang my head against a wall, I start to run to the initial room. Now at least I have an idea and all I need to eventually succeed was training. Perhaps I will even learn how the “food teleportation runes” works and cheese the system.

Now, wouldn’t that just be peachy?

A mental image of the next attack on the village comes to me, but I put it off. It’s starting to take too long, but Merlin is there and he can control the roots well enough. This is important, I didn’t hear of anyone else getting one of these trials so I must make the most of it.