roadtomastery
patreon
Chapter 180: Labyrinth Ring
🕑 Added 2023-05-02 17:36:01 +0000 UTCShorter chapter this time, but there were some pretty large ones recently. Now, it is perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
Enjoy!
---
The labyrinth contained a whole lot of nothing. Torch-lit corridors as far as the eye could see. Turns after turns after twists and bends. Dead ends. Brown stone in all directions. Forks and intersections every two minutes.
It was driving Jack mad. Even his newest title didn’t help.
Congratulations! Title “Fifth Ring Conqueror” upgraded to “Sixth Ring Conqueror!”
Efficacy of all stats: +25% → +30%
Labyrinth Ring Quest:
- Defeat the Guardian.
- Make your way to Garden Ring.
However, what drove him even madder than the labyrinth itself was worry.
Brock is somewhere out there… Without me. Jack’s heart was strangled by black snakes as he ran, making turns and bends and twists. Please be okay. Please be okay.
The labyrinth wasn’t supposed to split the two of them. They were bound spiritually. Even teleportation worked on both at the same time. So why?
Jack didn’t know. All he could do was endure his fear and run, hoping to catch a sound, any sound, so he could follow it. Alas, all he heard was his own footsteps, endlessly stomping against the stone.
“BROCK!” he shouted. So what if there were monsters in the labyrinth? By now, he could take most of them. Even if an Elite showed up, he could activate his Life Drop and hope for the best. It might draw even stronger things at him, but nothing he could do about that. If there was a God, the labyrinth monsters would lack the space monsters’ acute Dao perception.
And if a King showed up…
Well, Jack had to risk it. Brock wasn’t even at the E-Grade. If any monster noticed him, he was instantly dead.
Name: Jack Rust
Species: Human, Earth-387
Faction: Bare Fist Brotherhood (E)
Grade: E
Class: Fiend of the Iron Fist (Elite)
Level: 93
Strength: 370
Dexterity: 370
Constitution: 370
Mental: 50
Will: 80
Skills: Ghost Step I
Dao Skills: Indomitable Body III, Meteor Punch II, Iron Fist Style II, Brutalizing Aura I
Daos: Perfect Dao Seed of the Fist (late), Dao Root of Indomitable Will (fused), Dao Root of Life (fused), Dao Root of Power
Titles: Planetary Frontrunner (10), Planetary Torchbearer (1), Sixth Ring Conqueror
Trial Planet had been kind to Jack. Fruitful. His Level had risen meteorically, reaching almost the high E-Grade, and his skills and Dao Roots had vastly increased in potency.
Unfortunately, there was nothing in that status screen to help him locate Brock.
How big could the Labyrinth be?
Surely, not too much. This was the seventh ring already. They had to be pretty close to the planet’s core.
If every ring is around a hundred miles wide, and there are two rings under me, I’m at a radius of two hundred miles. The surface of such a sphere…
Jack did some quick calculations, and the result made him pale. Five hundred thousand square miles!? That can’t be right…
From what he understood, there was only one Guardian. The labyrinth had to be small enough that the cultivators could walk there no matter which entrance they used.
Maybe the rings get smaller. Maybe I’m in a radius of… What’s the best case? Ten miles?
Even ten miles came up to a surface area of over a thousand square miles. There had to be something better. There was no way people were expected to travel a thousand miles through such crampy, winding stone corridors. They would die of thirst before even reaching the guardian.
Regardless, Jack’s result was that the labyrinth was large. Perhaps not as unfathomably large as he calculated it, but still highly expansive. Finding Brock here would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Jack’s heart dropped as his steps slowed down. Where even am I? he wondered, looking around. Darker walls lead to the guardian. Got it.
Maybe Brock would run into other cultivators and manage to ally with them. All Jack could do was travel to the meeting point—the guardian—and hope for the best, while mentally berating himself all the while.
Harambe trusted me with his own son, and I went and lost him. Idiot.
Jack’s mood was at an all time low. He itched to bury his fist into a wall, and he would have, if he wasn’t afraid of the corridor collapsing on his head.
Which is why he was pleasantly surprised to see a monster round the corner.
It was an abomination. Like two skeletons spun together, a monster of twisting bone and scrawny limbs. It had a vaguely humanoid shape, except its entire body was bleached white and made of bones twisted around each other like a beanstalk.
Bone Sentinel, Level 124
A creature made to endlessly wander the Labyrinth Ring’s corridors and fight intruders. It possesses low Mental and Will attributes, as well as low speed, but outstanding strength and durability. When a Bone Sentinel slays an enemy, it either absorbs their skeleton into its own or raises the skeleton as a new Bone Sentinel. Therefore, their numbers are self-replenishing.
Knowing that defeat would let this monster spin his own skeleton into a monster didn’t at all abate Jack’s fighting spirit.
“Come here, fucker,” he said, cracking his knuckles. “I will break all your bones and feed them to you.”
If the Bone Sentinel understood his words, it didn’t show it. Instead, it charged forth, raising two hands tipped with sharpened bone claws. A thick white tail followed it around the corner, lined with teeth and ending in a human skull.
Jack let it approach. After facing Copy Jack and Bocor, its movements seemed telegraphed. When it got within nine feet, he crouched into a stance, ghost-stepped into its guard, and smashed his fist right into its chest, exploding as a Meteor Punch.
He felt bone shatter under his knuckles. The monster’s body caved under the strike. The explosion carried on inside its body, shattering its innards and sending shards of bone flying out of the wound.
Still, the monster held. As it exploded backward, its tail slithered pastJack and raked his thigh, carving a bone-deep wound with the skull’s teeth. Jack grimaced. However, this pain was nothing compared to the Ancient trial.
He charged, catching up with the monster before it even hit the far wall, and smashed out another Meteor Punch. It tried to block. Its crossed arms protected its chest, a grotesque sight of twisted bone that made Jack’s stomach lurch, but it was unable to block his full-power strike.
Bone shattered. The walls shook as the monster crashed into them, leaving a finger-deep impression on the stone, then collapsed in a broken heap.
Level up! You have reached Level 94.
Jack stood over it, panting. He had received another slash to the ribs as he obliterated the monster, but nothing too deep. He could already sense his regenerative powers stitching his skin together, regrowing his muscles and tendons.
It was pretty disturbing, actually.
As he observed the broken monster, his fear for Brock intensified. These things would cut the brorilla into ribbons. If the labyrinth was filled with them…
I need to keep moving, he thought.
Endless corridors after endless corridors. Jack didn’t know if he was moving in the right direction. The walls were supposed to darken as one approached the guardian, but he couldn’t spot any difference. Was he just moving in circles?
At the next fork, he tried to turn by ninety degrees and keep going as straight as possible. After a while, the walls got just a touch darker. Or maybe it was just his impression.
Hours passed.
Throughout the journey, Jack discovered a few interesting things. There were crab monsters patrolling the corridors—little blue things that reached up to his knee. However, they were weak. Far too weak to challenge anyone with the ability to make it here. And they skittered away whenever they saw him.
Why?
Stone-eater Crab, Level 56
Crabs that subsist entirely on stone, which their unique digestion system can metabolize into water and nutrition. For that reason, they are often found deep beneath the earth, living in large communities that, over centuries, hollow out rock formations.
Jack failed to see what a stone-eating crab added to this labyrinth. Eating the walls? On the bright side, he didn’t care, either.
He only ran into one more bone sentinel. The rest of the living creatures he met were all blue crabs, and even those only appeared once every ten minutes, roughly. For the most part, the labyrinth was despondently empty.
That was a good sign. With a little bit of luck and caution, Brock could maybe avoid everything.
However, Jack also hadn’t met a single cultivator. He hadn’t heard or seen signs of intelligent life. It was like he had his own, private labyrinth.
After defeating a crab—to see if something would happen, but nothing did—he used one of its pincers to carve a capital J on the walls. He then put the crab down and promised not to kill another—they hadn’t attacked him, and they were so low-leveled they barely even gave him any experience.
It was one of those times when things randomly came into context. The black wolf he’d fought tooth and nail against at the Forest of the Strong was weaker than these crabs. It was a stunning realization. Sometimes, he just failed to understand how quickly and how far he was progressing.
To the current him, the black wolf would be almost comically slow. To a normal human, these little blue crabs would be fast as lightning. Maybe their little pincers could snap clean through a limb.
Jack didn’t know how long he spent alone in the labyrinth. It could have been six hours. It could have been two days. His throat was getting parched—Brock had his supplies—and the walls were slowly, discreetly getting darker. By now, he was pretty sure they were several shades darker than when he first started exploring. He was on the right track.
Wandering became mindless. He simply jogged ahead—at the speed of a pre-System human’s sprint—taking one turn after another.
When another cultivator appeared, he almost didn’t register them. Then, his eyes widened, and his thoughts screeched to a halt, as did his feet.
“Jack Rust,” said the other person. “What a coincidence.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” said Jack.
