Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 179: Ititius’s Riddle

Valerius stood in the center of the carnage, breathing as he wiped sweat from his forehead.

He checked the glowing cores of the monsters he had personally slain.

Nothing...

He checked another ten.

Nothing too...

Valerius’s face fell.

He walked over to Silas, reaching into his pocket, and was begrudgingly forced to hand Silas the only other artifact that had been dropped in the entire basin... a glowing silver ring.

"Two artifacts," Valerius grumbled, throwing his hands up in disgust. "Out of a hundred elite monsters, only two dropped loot! It seemed that the god had been lying about everything again!"

Silas took the ring, tossing it into his inventory with a smirk. "That was not surprising in the least. He’s a god of a Secret Realm and the house always wins."

Before they could rest, the God resumed his broadcast.

"Congratulations, my brutal little gladiators!" Ititus clapped his hands over the audio feed. "You actually survived the horde! What an impressive display of violence!"

All of them stopped wiping their weapons and looked up at the ceiling, collectively thinking the exact same thing.

’You know we don’t think you’re dead right...?’

There was absolutely no way a pre-recorded message from so long ago could actively comment on their specific combat performance and timing with such perfect accuracy.

The god was either actively watching them through a viewing orb, or his consciousness was bound to the dungeon core.

However, the God completely ignored their suspicion and continued his monologue.

"Now that the courtyard is cleared," Ititus announced, "it is time to proceed to the inner sanctum! Ahead of you lie three massive caves!"

At the far end of the place, the stone wall rumbled, grinding upward to reveal three identical, dark archways leading into the deep earth: Left, Center, and Right.

"To decide your path, I shall give you a divine riddle!" the god proclaimed cheerfully. "If this riddle is answered correctly... you will walk the true path and find the way out toward the grand treasury! But if it is answered incorrectly... the wrong cave will violently break off from the spatial grid and send the person who entered it even deeper into the dungeon!"

The group tensed.

"Don’t worry too much!" Ititus laughed lightly. "Even if you fall into the deep Abyss, you won’t die immediately! You will be let out automatically when the 24-hour dungeon cycle is dismissed. However... you will completely miss all remaining chances on high-tier treasure! Now, listen closely to my words!"

The god cleared his throat.

"I have no voice, but I tell of the end.

I sit in the middle, where broken roads mend.

The hand on the left seeks the gold in the dark,

While the path on the right leaves no trace of a mark.

If you seek what is real, leave the shadow behind,

Walk where the left and the center entwine!"

The broadcast clicked off, leaving the three dark cave entrances looming silently before them.

Valerius immediately stepped close to Silas, leaning in as they whispered among themselves after the riddle was done.

"What do you think, Graves?" Valerius muttered, keeping his voice low so the girls wouldn’t interrupt. "The phrasing at the end is completely literal. ’Walk where the left and the center entwine.’ It seemed like Center and Left were the obvious, correct answers based on the riddle."

Silas rubbed his chin, his golden-ringed eyes staring at the dark tunnels. "It sounds obvious but exactly too obvious."

"Explain," Valerius frowned.

"The god is a pathological liar, Sterling," Silas whispered back with his paranoia working overtime. "We just agreed five minutes ago that he twists every word. If he explicitly tells us in the final line to take the Left and Center caves, why the hell would we trust him? He’s known to lie! So... shouldn’t we apply reverse logic? What if the real paths are Right and Center, and the Left is the trap?"

Valerius stared at the tunnels, agonizing over the decision.

For two full minutes, the two Lords debated the semantics of ancient divine psychology, weighing the probability of a double-bluff versus a straight lie.

In the end, Valerius shook his head, sighing deeply.

"We’re overthinking it," Valerius decided, gripping his sword. "If it’s a double-bluff, we screw ourselves by guessing random directions. We play the board as written. We go with what the riddle literally said... Left and Center."

"Fine," Silas agreed grudgingly. "We split the risk."

They assigned the routes immediately. Valerius and his Hero, Mia, took the Left cave.

However, before they entered, Silas broke away from Aeliana, walking over to Seraphina who was standing near the Right cave entrance.

Seraphina hadn’t understood the riddle yet since she had been too busy focusing on breathing through the pain of her 50% stat reduction to analyze the poem.

Silas stopped in front of her, looking down at her exhausted, wobbly posture.

"You take the Right cave," Silas told her quietly.

Seraphina blinked her red eyes, looking at the dark right tunnel, then back at him with deep suspicion.

Silas leaned in slightly.

"I listened to the breakdown. I’m purposely sending you down the right path to make sure you’re safe. Based on the riddle, the right path ’leaves no trace of a mark.’ It’s an empty transit tunnel. There are no monsters, no traps, and no combat trials down there. You can’t fight with that collar on, so you need the safest route."

Seraphina narrowed her eyes, staring at his calm face.

’He must be lying...’ Seraphina thought instinctively, her aristocratic cynicism flaring.

Why would this Lord give her the easiest safest route for free?

But as she looked at his steady gaze, and felt the aching exhaustion in her wobbly legs, she didn’t argue.

She did it regardless.

Even if he was lying, the last room sounded like absolutely no trouble compared to fighting another hundred sand beasts.

She gave him a short, silent nod, turned around, and walked into the dark Right cave alone.

Soon, the group was fully separated into the three tunnels.

On the far left, Mia and Valerius were walking in there, their footsteps echoing on the damp stone.

On the far right, Seraphina was in there alone with her hand resting defensively on her dagger as she navigated the quiet dark.

And in the middle cave, Silas and Aeliana were walking in there together with the silver glow of Aeliana’s starlight illuminating the smooth stone walls around them.

For a few minutes, the middle tunnel was completely peaceful.

Then, the God’s voice boomed directly inside the center cavern, vibrating the very air they breathed.

"Did you really believe me?!" Ititus laughed hysterically, his voice dripping with pure, unadulterated sadistic glee. "I told you! I’m a god of secrets! It’s time for one of you to fall!"

Silas froze.

’Huh...’

CRACK! KRA-THOOM!

The solid bedrock ground directly below Silas and Aeliana violently cracked as massive fault lines shot across the floor in a microsecond with the stone completely giving way beneath their boots.

"Better luck next time!" the God mocked loudly as the structural integrity of the tunnel collapsed entirely.

"Lord Sy!" Aeliana cried out, reaching for him.

The ground broke open like a shattering eggshell, revealing a bottomless, pitch-black void beneath them.

Gravity seized them instantly, violently swallowing both the Lord and the Elf below into the absolute darkness of the deep Abyss.

Over in the left and right tunnels, Valerius and Seraphina barely had time to register the structural failure.

The floor completely gave way beneath their heavy boots, shattering into thousands of useless, crumbling fragments.

"Did you really believe there was a right answer?!" Ititus’s voice echoed through the collapsing tunnels, dripping with pure, unadulterated sadistic glee. "I’m a god of secrets! Every path leads down!"

Valerius felt the sickening lurch of zero gravity.

He threw his arms out, his green aura flaring as he desperately tried to catch an updraft, but the spatial magic of the trap actively suppressed his wind affinity.

"You honorless bastard!" Valerius roared with his voice echoing into the dark as he plummeted out of sight.

In the right tunnel, Seraphina fell in terrifying silence. Her mouth was open in a silent scream with her red hair whipping violently upward as the pitch-black abyss swallowed her whole, the cursed spider artifact clamped tightly to her throat rendering her mute.

In the center cavern, as gravity seized them and dragged them downward with terrifying velocity, Aeliana didn’t hesitate.

"Lord Sy! I’m here!" Aeliana cried out, her pristine white robes fluttering wildly as the rushing wind tore at her silver hair.

She reached her slender hand out toward him in the dark but Silas didn’t panic.

His combat instincts took over the instant the floor collapsed as he twisted his torso mid-air, ignoring the vertigo, and kicked off a falling slab of bedrock to launch himself horizontally across the void.

He closed the distance in a heartbeat, wrapping his muscular arms tightly around Aeliana’s waist and pulling her flush against his chest.

"I’ve got you," Silas said, his voice calm and steady near her ear.

He shifted his weight, rotating their falling bodies so that his back was facing the ground and he braced his legs, channeling dense mana into his calves and boots to absorb the impending shock.

They fell for what felt like an eternity through the suffocating blackness.

THUD!

Silas hit the ground incredibly hard.

The impact shuddered through his heavy boots and sent a violent shockwave up his spine, but his durability held firm. He bent his knees, sliding backward through a thick loose layer of sediment to completely arrest their momentum.

He didn’t drop Aeliana. He held her securely until they came to a complete halt, then gently set her down on her feet.

"Are you hurt?" Silas asked, his golden-ringed eyes rapidly scanning her for injuries.

"I am perfectly fine, My Lord," Aeliana assured him, smoothing out her white spider-silk robes, though her chest was heaving slightly from the adrenaline of the fall. "Thank you."

Silas nodded, turning his attention to their surroundings.

The environment was completely different from the arena above.

The ground beneath their boots wasn’t stone or regular black sand again...

It was an ocean of pitch-black sand, so dark it seemed to actively absorb the light radiating from Aeliana’s starlight mana. The dark sand was constantly, unnervingly shifting around their ankles, whispering like dry leaves rubbing together.

The air was freezing.

"Welcome, little intruders, to the absolute deepest depths of my Dungeon!"

The voice of the dead god resonated through the cavernous space, no longer cheerful but sounding quite harsh.

"This is the Abyss," Ititus announced proudly. "The final holding cell where the most dangerous, the most unkillable of my ancient enemies were kept in the dark for millennia."

The god paused with a sinister chuckle echoing off the unseen walls. "But you shouldn’t be that worried! The rot of time has taken its toll. They aren’t too harmful anymore! Good luck finding a way out!"

Silas let out a deeply exhausted sigh, reaching into his trench coat.

"Gods are such dramatic pricks," Silas muttered. "Could never be my Elu though..."

He pulled out his heavy brass Treasure Radar, tapping the glass screen to recalibrate the tracking matrix for the new spatial layer.

The green screen flickered to life. The needle spun once, twice, and then locked onto a single solitary coordinate.

PING!

Silas frowned. He smacked the side of the brass device, assuming the fall had broken the internal runes.

PING!

There was only a singular treasure signature in the entire, massive subterranean cavern.

"You have got to be kidding me," Silas cursed out loud, his voice dripping with pure Warlord annoyance. "One? We fell into the deepest deadliest layer of the god’s prison, and there is only one piece of loot down here?!"

"Quality over quantity, my greedy boy!" Ititus’s voice laughed heartily from the shadows, thoroughly enjoying Silas’s frustration.

Silas ignored the dead god, narrowing his eyes as he looked toward the far end of the cavern, following the radar’s bearing.

Through the gloom, about a hundred yards away, sitting atop a jagged pedestal of black stone, was the treasure.

It wasn’t a sword, a shield, or a glowing crystal.

It was an intricately carved fist-sized artifact that looked exactly like a reptilian eye. The iris was a brilliant, swirling gold, encased in dark, petrified amber, and it radiated an aura of mana so incredibly dense that the air around it was physically rippling.

Silas opened his Lord interface with his pupils locking onto the distant object to trigger the scan.

The translucent blue screen manifested in his vision, and the data that scrolled across it made Silas’s breath completely hitch in his throat.

[Name]: The Warden’s Eye

[Type]: Sealing Artifact

[Tier]: Tier 4

[Description]: An ancient, reality-warping containment vessel forged from the crystallized ocular core of a primordial beast.

By actively pouring mana into the iris, the user can forcefully compress and seal any kind of monster, physical object, or energy construct within its internal pocket dimension. The artifact’s internal space is virtually limitless.

[Warning]: The sealing capacity scales directly with the user’s raw mana output and core density. In the hands of a Supreme entity, this artifact is theoretically capable of sealing actual gods.