Chapter 379: Game Over |
Whatever was sealed beside this place now knew exactly where to look.
It could also change the rules on a whim or at least whenever it decided I was cheating.
“Now we will play another game,” a withered voice drifted from the mist, this one sounding nothing like mine. “Up is down, forward is backward, left is right, and right is left.”
The mist thickened around me immediately.
It pressed close enough that the world beyond a few steps simply ceased to exist. Earlier the mist had been thin, and during the day my enhanced sight had allowed me to see what was happening outside the mountains.
Now that was no longer the case.
There was no sense of pressure and no resistance.
I took a careful step backward.
The mist parted in front of me.
Yet the space ahead had advanced toward me instead.
So that was the game.
I wasn’t moving incorrectly. The space around me was twisted.
Every direction I chose was being remapped through a local distortion, like walking across a folded surface without ever seeing the fold itself.
Backward carried me forward.
Left carried me right.
Up pressed downward.
My body obeyed its own logic.
The world did not.
I tested it again, slowly.
I leaned to the left.
The mist thinned on my right.
I lowered my stance.
The air above me grew denser.
No delay.
Which meant there was no “correct” direction to choose.
I moved carefully, not trying to reach anything, simply mapping how the distortion behaved. The mist never extended more than a few steps away from me. Wherever I went, it followed closely, enclosing only my immediate surroundings.
That told me that the game wasn’t happening here.
Then I saw a dull, steady orange glow bleeding through the mist. It was a fire.
I took a backward step and found myself closer to it.
Another backward step brought me to the edge of a small camp.
Two figures sat beside the fire, arguing quietly about whether the food was already burned. As I moved closer, the mist thinned again, and I could clearly see Jiang Yeming and Tingfeng.
My students. They hadn’t moved an inch.
They hadn’t noticed the distortion at all as I moved irregularly around them.
Though Jiang Yeming turned my way and narrowed her eyes. “What rules does it use now?”
The mist stopped at the edge of the firelight, refusing to advance any further.
The game’s boundary ended precisely where they were.
No. This wasn’t one game. This was two games colliding.
Their shadow-step game and my new one.
I turned my head slightly, addressing the mist without raising my voice.
“That’s enough,” I said. “Let them out.”
The mist stirred, almost like a coy friend.
A pause followed, and the fire crackled, sounding loud in the silence.
“You are leaving already?” the withered voice asked, closer now.
“They’re not part of this. Also, my second game will keep me here a bit longer until I solve it, and I already know how to solve their game. I just have to tell them,” I replied. “And I’ll return here another time.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
Then something like a soft, dry chuckle drifted through the mist. “That is acceptable.”
The distortion loosened. The mist peeled away from me, retreating until space reasserted its usual rules. Forward was forward again. The ground felt honest beneath my feet.
The world settled.
Before it fully vanished, the voice spoke once more.
“It was fun,” it said. “Playing with you.”
I inclined my head slightly, the way one acknowledges a person rather than a threat.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“We’ll play again,” I said.
The mist faded completely.
Behind me, my students were still standing in silence like statues.
Then the mist around us cleared, forming a straight path that led outward. Jiang Yeming immediately stood up.
“It is letting us out. We need to escape,” she said.
As she ran ahead, Tingfeng followed.
I didn’t run.
I simply walked after them with my hands behind my back, smiling.
“How come there is no information about your games outside?” I asked.
“Most people who passed the first game did so through luck and never understood what they were doing,” the voice replied, its withered tone drifting through the mist. “Well… perhaps some understood after all and simply tricked me. That girl seems to know quite a bit about it. Can you tell her not to spread this around? What puzzle is fun when everyone already knows the solution?”
“Can’t you create some new games?” I asked.
“Why are you asking for new games when you haven’t tried them all?” the voice grumbled. “I went easy on you with that directions game. I’ll have you know that is one of the easier ones!”
“No, I was just worried that we might meet often enough in the future that we’ll run out of games. So I want you to think of some new ones,” I told it.
“Ah,” the voice muttered. “I can only add new minor rules to the array here once every 2,304 years.”
“Well, that’s a shame,” I said.
I stayed silent until I was almost at the edge where the mist thinned into open air.
“By the way… how did you notice us when we were so far away?” I asked.
“There is a puzzle in one of the games related to names,” the voice said. “We must guess each other’s real names. I won’t go into detail to avoid spoiling it. But the girl wrote my name in the mud three times.”
A brief pause.
“And the rules of that game allow me to sense whoever writes my name three times. I can then forcefully pull them into the game.”
Huh…
I glanced at Jiang Yeming.
Her face had gone pale.
She stared at the ground, not daring to meet my gaze.
“It wasn't so bad, because if you had continued, then you would have met those two Core Cultivators who were clashing before,” the misty voice said.
Then I took one step out, and the mist closed the opening behind us, blanketing the edges of the mountain range once more.
I walked up beside Jiang Yeming and stopped one step away from her.
She finally looked up and met my gaze.
“Never again,” I told her.
“Sorry,” she said quietly. “I will never do it again.”
“Good,” I nodded.
Then I turned toward our previous route and decided to take the one closest to the Misty Mountains, the one Jiang Yeming had initially suggested when we were discussing retreating.
This time we didn’t run.
We walked carefully, making sure we stayed outside the mist boundary while also keeping watch for anything unusual.
“Well…” Jiang Yeming tried to break the tense silence that had settled between us because of her. “You solved all the puzzles so fast. Though that step-measuring game only works the first time.”
“How many games are there?” I asked.
Continuing to scrutinize her served no real purpose anymore. So I simply moved on as if nothing had happened. If she were smart, she would have learned her lesson not to do something like that again.
“There are fourteen games in total,” she said. “Each one is different from the others, and they usually operate using rules that defy logic outside the Misty Mountains.”
I did the calculation in my head.
To create fourteen games, that creature must have been sealed inside the array for at least 32,256 years, since each game could only be created every 2,304 years.
…
As we walked away from the Misty Mountain Range until it vanished from sight, we climbed a low hill just as the morning sun began to shine over the land.
We had been traveling all night.
I raised my right palm toward the sky, as if expecting something to fall into it.
We continued walking as I did this. At first, there was nothing, only a dark dot high in the sky, barely visible.
But as it grew closer, it was clear it wasn’t a dot at all. It was a giant black cube. So dark that it seemed to swallow the light around it.
Tingfeng and Jiang Yeming both frowned.
Tingfeng drew his sword.
Jiang Yeming’s arms ignited with silver Qi that flickered like flames.
I waved a hand at them.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “This is mine.”
The cube descended rapidly. It was roughly the size of a small cottage, but as it approached it began to tremble, compressing slowly until it shrank to a size small enough to rest in my palm.
When it touched my hand, the surface shifted.
The cube became translucent, like dark-tinted glass, revealing the interior.
Inside it, a mist swirled slowly.
It looked simple. But the array behind it was anything but. This cube had taken a considerable amount of Qi to create.
The inside of the cube was far larger than the outside. Even after compression, the interior still retained the same spatial volume it had before shrinking.
This was the array I had created when I enveloped myself in darkness and erased my own shadow during the first game.
My array had cut slightly into the Misty Mountain array, and I had gathered some of the mist inside it to study once we returned home.
I turned the cube over in my hand for a moment before slipping it inside my robe.
Sadly, I couldn’t store it inside a storage ring. Doing so would have the same effect as putting one storage ring inside another.
Devastating, to say the least.
Seeing the smile on my face, Jiang Yeming cleared her throat, breaking the quiet monotony that had followed us ever since leaving the Misty Mountains.
“Do you think the Misty Mountains would make a good place to live?” she asked.
“Obviously not,” I answered immediately.
“What if people lived there together?” she continued. “Not just going there alone.”
“How would that make it any better?” I replied. “Only a madman would bring people there to settle. The place is bizarre. Many people and beasts have entered those mountains and never returned.”
I paused for a moment. “Also… the games were tedious.”
I wasn’t even sure if that puzzle-loving creature was the only thing living in those mountains.
After all, we had barely touched the outskirts of the mist, a place where we could still see the outside world while playing its games.
Jiang Yeming turned and looked back at the distant mountains with a strange fondness.
Did that place hold some deeper significance for her in the future?
Had she perhaps lived there?
“Actually,” she said quietly, “there are many more creatures there than just the one we met.”
She continued. “The deeper someone goes into those mountains, the more terrifying the sealed creatures become.”
Huh.
This world truly held some wonderful...
...and absolutely terrifying things waiting to be explored.
I couldn’t help but wonder how a place like that had even come to exist.
Because if those mountains were truly sealing creatures like that…
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