Chapter 2025 Different Route
Back in the spectator area.
There is a special room where the elders of various academies including Olaf, the dean of Thor's academy. They are all watching as the students got stuck in the never-ending tunnel.
"This guy. He already figured out the problem in the second obstacle. He is pretty good."
Dean spoke lightly as he watched Sam.
His gaze is intense as if some anger is hidden deeply inside it. Everyone else agreed.
"He is certainly fast, but that is still only half of the problem though. We still need to see how he can overcome it."
"Still, he is way ahead of the rest of the students. They didn't even find out. Maybe because they expended too much energy in the first obstacle."
"I don't know if that is intentional, but this guy really made everyone else take a step back. Three of them literally. That trap is pretty vicious. What the hell are you guys teaching their Chorus? You seemed to have created a dangerous fox." A lady from Hel Academy spoke with a smile.
Chorus looked at her lazily and yawned before saying.
"We didn't teach him anything. I am just as surprised as you guys are." His words and his expression didn't even match. It almost seemed like he couldn't even be bothered to be here and pay attention to this competition.
They obviously that he was bullshitting. But little did they know, the Gambler's Academy really didn't teach him anything at all.
They just focused back on the screen where Sam sat down.
They could see that he is densely spreading his energy around with his eyes closed. What they couldn't sense is that Sam is using his observation ability. But to his surprise, even his observation is not piercing past the tunnel walls. The most he could see was the wall on four sides up to four feet thick. It is indeed a very well-reinforced tunnel.
It would be very hard to dig out of it even if he tried.
The worst part is, he couldn't sense any formation laid down on the walls. He could even nick the bricks a little, but it took a lot of strength to even do that.
The material itself is a bit weird.
As Sam examined it, his body slowly levitated and moved forward once again. After a few meters of walk, he once again reappeared at the same spot. His body slowly went down on to the floor once again.
After a short while Sam finally opened his eyes, he had an interested expression on his face.
"This is going to be interesting."
One of the Elders spoke at the spectating area. It is an elder that belongs to the Thor Academy, the others looked at him in askance. He started explaining.
"The Never-ending tunnel is actually a very special trap. At the current level of the participating students, it is almost impossible for them to solve it alone."
"Then why bother even using such a trap?"
"Of course, we have to give them a way out. So, we put up a small loophole in the formation. Using that, they would be able to barely bypass the formation. But for that to happen, it is ideal if there are at least two to three people.
A single person doing that will be a behemoth of a task.
And it seems like this guy also noticed it."
"So, essentially, the trap he set up to screw others, screwed him?"
An elder grinned wildly as he looked at Chorus with a mocking gaze. But Chorus had the same expression as if this is a complete and utter waste of his time and he couldn't be bothered to be here.
At the same moment, in another tunnel, there are three students who also figured out that it is a never-ending tunnel trap and they are trying to figure out what is happening there.
The elders immediately focused on them because they wanted to see how they would resolve the trap. They even believed they would be the first ones to do it before Sam. But what they don't see is the smile that is widening on Sam's face.
Only Chorus, the one guy who seemed uninterested is focusing on it.
At this moment, Sam is still sitting on the ground and he is looking at the walls through his observation ability. He opened his eyes and stood up. He got an idea of what this trap actually is and he also found out what could be beyond this.
Usually, when someone is stuck in a neverending trap, it is most likely an illusion trap. People would be walking in circles, but they would feel like they are walking in a straight line.
In fact, the trio in the different tunnels are examining for that only. They are trying to find a way to get out of the illusion at this point. But Sam is sure that this is not an illusion. This is a spatial and architectural trick.
There is a small area here that marks the start of the never-ending tunnel which he also marked with a cross on the brick. Whenever he moves forward from that area, he walks into that same marked area after a few steps.
And Sam figured out the reason why.
Now imagine you are on a stationary train. It has exactly eleven carriages in total and you are in the sixth carriage. Exactly the center.
He is moving forward to reach the seventh carriage and as he walks forward instead of going to the eighth carriage, he ends back in the sixth carriage. In a way, the seventh and fifth carriages are interchanging whenever he is inside.
Of course, this is just an analogy, Sam doesn't know how far the tunnel goes in the front, but he does know there is not much in the back. So, essentially, the center mark he is standing in right now is not exactly the center. The tunnel ahead is mostly much longer.
Now Sam marked the area that he is in as the Origin and the area it occupied as a block. He decided to divide the rest of the tunnel in the length of these blocks. He used spatial blink and moved one block forward.
He landed in the tunnel and as he moved forward, he soon ended up in the same Origin Block.
He used blink for two blocks, landed, and walked forward. He entered the same origin block once again and even this time, the walking distance needed to reach the origin block after landing is the same.
Sam repeated the same thing again and again, each time increasing the distance by one block. He blinked three blocks, four blocks, five blocks, six blocks, seven blocks, and finally stopped at eight blocks. Anything past that is restricted.
He figured the second test area is limited to the eight-block area forward. But no matter how many blocks he traveled ahead with a blink, he only needed to walk the same distance to reach the origin block.
Apart from all of this, Sam noticed a few more things. The structure of stone bricks in the walls around and above him is very complicated. It seems like each stone carries an individual formation within it, not on its surface, but inside the structure creating a special composite.
As for the spatial formation responsible for swapping of the blocks, it is not within the walls, at least not within the part of the walls that he could track with observation ability. The energy is not passing beneath it.
The only thing he is sure of is that the wall thickness might be the same on all sides, and it is the same as the floor thickness beneath him and luckily he found something off with the floors. He is sure that it is not just luck, it was left there for him to find out.
The formations in the internal structure of the stones on the floor have a few open nodes.
Sam started conjuring another formation on it, but this time it is not a spatial formation, instead it is a formation suited for distortion and deconstruction.
As soon as the formation was laid down…
*CRACK*
The floor cracked and then a bunch of stones turned into power.
With a wave of his hand, the powder flew out an revealed another layer of stones beneath it.
The elders who were watching this were a bit surprised. At the same time, in the tunnel, three people who figured out the never-ending tunnel trick also managed to break the floor."
"This is impressive. This guy managed to crack it down alone." One of the elders spoke.
The elder who said it would be hard for Sam frowned and focused. Then he revealed a smile.
"Huh, I knew it. It can't be that easy. See, that guy only cracked one layer of the floor. There is another layer beneath it. He messed up because, unless he breaks both the layers at the same time, he wouldn't be able to go past the route."
Then only the elders noticed that the other tunnel with three participants created a hole.
The three of them went down and that screen changed to a new location with a room that had three paths for them to take.
Meanwhile, on Sam's screen, he had a smirk on his face. His energy ran wild as it was directed to the second layer of the floor. He used the observation ability and it is spread throughout the tunnel. Instead of the first surface, it is all enveloped to the second surface.
Sam smirked the next moment.
There are two layers to this tunnel. The outer layer holds the space formations. Whichever block Sam lands on after the origin block, the tunnel will interchange the whole block with the one before the origin block.
It is a very straightforward one. The only reason it was undetectable is because of the intricate formations in the inner layer. Sam activated partial space fusion and injected his energy into the wall.
*BOOM* *BOOM* *BOOM*
Small explosions happened throughout and the Elder who was just bragging about how Sam couldn't solve the formation, stood up. Sam didn't make a hole in the origin block like the others. Instead, he walked forward in the tunnel and this time, the blocks didn't interchange. In the next minute, he is in a completely different room.
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