Chapter 224: Second Room, Winter Break (1/2)

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The link is also in the synopsis.

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The day before the Christmas break, close to eleven in the cover of night, Quinn stepped into the Architect's vault and into the first room of the vault. It was as he had seen it for the first time he had entered the vault.

”Solving this every time I come in here is annoying,” Quinn voiced to himself as he descended the few steps to the pedestal in the middle of the room.

Quinn had found out that every time he stepped out of the vault, the pedestal would rise up again and lock the archway staircase back into the wall.

He stood by the pedestal as he flooded everything stone in the vault with his magic, and soon after, the entire room began shaking as Quinn began solving the mechanism inside the walls. The nine portions that made up the mechanism could be divided into three parts — [1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9].

The first three were individual locks with no dependence on other portions from their group. The second three were connected in successions where every solved portion was added to the next portion. The last three were interconnected and were mutually exclusive to each other and needed to be solved simultaneously.

And as Quinn stood by the pedestal, he solved all three sets simultaneously to be quicker, and now that he knew the correct combinations, he was able to use parallel thought processing at a manageable level without a migraine in his future. The pedestal started to fall one by one in quick successions, and as he walked towards the revealing archway, the last three portions clicked together, the pedestal went into the ground.

He stared down the dark staircase with the end nowhere in sight. Two orbs of light manifested around him as he stepped down the first step, and they flew steps ahead of him and stopped to hover at the sides of the staircase. Another two orbs of light shimmered into existence and flew farther than the previous two orbs and placed them beside the walls. Just like that, two new orbs of light would appear, fly deeper into the staircase, and line the walls to light up the entire staircase.

Soon he arrived at the end of the staircase and stepped out of the tunnel into an expansive room. Quinn stared around the strange room as he stepped forward deeper into the room; it was an empty chamber; just like the first room with the pedestal, this room didn't have any decoration and seemed purely functional in nature.

He stopped one-fifth of the way into the room and stopped just at the edge of where the floor ended and stared down the deep and dark chasm right in the middle of the room. The first time he had entered the room, the chasm had reminded Quinn of an abyss. He looked up from the ravine and stared at the other side to see the continuation of the floor and the opposite of the room. Three-fifths of the room was the chasm, with one-fifth of the floor of the room's length on each side.

Quinn's initial thought had been that the Architect wanted him to cross over the chasm and get to the other side, which he easily did with a broom, but the result was disappointing — there was nothing there — the room only had the one door.. . but that was just code for the existence of a hidden exit.

”Where's it hidden this time,” said Quinn, once again looking for clues, which he had already done the last time he was here.

The room was definitely created by the Architect. There was no surface in the room that wasn't smooth and straight — the ravine in the middle of the room was perfectly rectangular with no irregularities. The walls, the floors, the ceiling were marked with gridlines.

There was only one place remaining in the room that he hadn't looked in. He once again looked down into the dark ravine, and dozens upon dozens of orbs of light appeared above the ravine before dropping down into the chasm, lighting it up in the bright white light.

”Let's go,” said Quinn and stepped forward and down into the chasm. His robes fluttered up as he fell down around thirty feet and landed with a smooth, bright blue Arresto Momentum.

He landed on a flat surface and looked around the lit-up bottom of the chasm with observing eyes, and just like above, the surfaces were covered in grids, but there was one thing that seemed out-of-place — a large white cube laid in the middle of the floor. It stood out from its grey surroundings.

Quinn approached the cube cautiously and walked around it a couple rounds to observe it thoroughly. From just taking a look, there wasn't anything of exception other than that the cube was sitting perfectly on a square in the grid on the floor.

”Alright, let's see what's the deal with this,” he said and stepped near the cube, but when the tips of his fingers touched the cube, it suddenly trembled.

”Whoa,” Quinn immediately stepped back from the cube, ”I just touched it.”

The tremble lasted only for a few seconds before the cube stilled. It was only after that the changes started to appear.

First, a line appeared that separated the cube into two halves — upper and lower.

Then another line further divided the upper-half into two other halves — left and right.

Next, two large circles appeared on both the right and left halves, and then two perfect cylinders with smaller radiuses rose from the circles; they rose for a foot before stopping.

The second the cylinders settled at their peak height, another circle appeared in the middle of the upper half of the cube such that the line which divided the cube into left and right passed right through the center of the circle.

The portion of the line inside the circle disappeared, and another cylinder rose; this time, the entire circle rose instead of a smaller part. Quinn watched as the cylinder rose for half a foot before he saw the end of the cylinder as it rose up into the air and then flew to the straight right above one of the raised cylinder platforms.

The floating cylinder stilled for a movement before it started to vibrate and wiggle — the cylinder turned into a pile of grainy dust before reforming into a perfect solid cube, which then gently set down on the cylinder platform.

'That's.. .' thought Quinn, but before he could even finish it, a sound broke his line of thought.

Quinn looked to his side to see a cube in the wall grid slide out with the sound of stone grinding against stone and suddenly changing to white from its original grey.

”That's transmutation,” said Quinn looking back and forth between the wall cube and the apparatus that rose from the center cube.

”So.. . what do I need to do here?” Quinn said to himself. There were generally no written instructions for him, and he needed to figure out the next from the circumstantial clues present in front of him.

He touched the small cube on the cylinder and flooded it with his magic; it was made from a dense stone with an incredibly smooth surface. Then he moved to the bigger wall cube and did the same things; this one was made from the same material.

”Okay, let's try this,” said Quinn with a scrunched-up expression on his face. Quinn pushed out more magic into the stone, and this time, instead of scanning, he used transmutation and pulled his hand back for a block of white stone to come out detached from the bigger block.

Quinn heavily sighed in relief, ”Oh, thank magic, this wasn't covered with defensive spells.” He had tried transmutations in the first room, and it was safe to say that Quinn wasn't a fan of explosions going off in front of his face.

”Hmm, same material.. . transmutation from the vault's side.. . my own transmutation also worked perfectly,” Quinn contemplated for a good few minutes before he went back to apparatus-cube.

He put down the block he had taken out from the wall cube aside and focused his attention on the cube sitting on the cylinder platform. He reached into his pockets, took out a tape measure, and began measuring the sides of the cube, and after a couple of measurements, he picked up the block from the wall cube and cast transmutation on it.

The block vibrated and turned into an unstable state before solidifying into a cube shape. As the block was heavier than the cube on the platform, the resulting cube was larger than it. So, Quinn began shaving it down with transmutation until he had a replica of the platform cube in his hand.

”Now, let's see if my guess is correct.”

Quinn gently placed the replica on the second cylindrical platform, and it was instant that the apparatus cube began vibrating. The vibrations persisted for a couple of seconds before the replica cube rose and along with it the material that Quinn had shaved off. Everything went back into the wall cube and transmuted back to its initial stage.

The wall cube then slid back into the wall, and when it was again part of the grid, it turned back from white to grey. But it wasn't over yet because the cube next to it in the grid slid out and turned white.

Quinn looked back at the apparatus cube and saw that the cube on the platform had also changed into a cuboid.

”Ah, so that's how it's going to be, huh,” said Quinn.

He understood what he needed to do. Every time a cube came out of the wall, he needed to take some out of it and use transmutation to make a replica of the object on the first cylinder platform and place said replica on the second cylinder platform — if it matched the material he took out would go back in, and the next wall cube would come out, the shape to replicate would change, and the process would repeat.

”Well, that's good and all.. . but,” Quinn looked around the chasm and then at the roof above, he imagined the entire room, ”isn't this too much?”

Of a rough calculation off his head, there were at least around a couple hundred cubes in the grids around the room.

”This is going to be another freaking long thing.. .” said Quinn, his voice showing his displeasure — he didn't like grunt work at all.

He didn't know that the Architect had something else in his mind when he created this room.

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- (Scene Break) -

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