Labyrinth Trial

I acted extremely cautiously as I entered the large temple. Snake type enemies were a bad matchup for an archer, and not a great one for a swordsman either. Still, with how fast my Lamentation Bow's arrows traveled, maybe I had a better chance.

This time, I wasn't set upon immediately. The first room was laid out similarly to the inside of the central tower, except instead of a mysterious mural at the rear of the room, there was actual text:

Soul, Mind, and Body

Each are tested in their turn

Win through for the prize

To the left was a sealed door with a misty orb, reminding me of an oversized crystal ball, in its center. Assuming the text was a reliable hint, I guessed it was probably an Aura measuring device of some kind, something placed to make sure someone who got here met a minimum standard in cultivation talent.

I went to place my hand on the orb, and I felt a little resistance when my palm was less than an inch away. It barely slowed me down though, but in a few seconds, as a dim light appeared and started growing brighter in the orb, the resistance increased. I held on, and I only exerted myself in the last few seconds, after the orb had gotten a lot brighter. Then, when it was shining enough that I couldn't see any of the mist inside, the resistance stopped, and the door began to slide open.

The next room was a hall full of red, black, and yellow tiles, each about 2 feet square. A small tablet with writing was placed just before the tiles began: Change colors with every step. Tread not the venomous pattern.

Venomous pattern…now what does that mean? Obviously the color of the tiles is significant…maybe something to do with a snake-type magical beast?

I sat down short of the tiles, spending an unknown time deep in thought, trying to recall every lesson on snake-type magical beasts I'd had. Eventually, I remembered a snippet from second year:

"…However, some varieties of snake-type magical beasts are quite small," Hasegawa had said, "and some of those can be, in some ways, even more deadly than large ones, because they carry potent venom. The Millenium Serpent, for example, is so named because it infuses Aura into its venom in a special process that makes it so potent, one bite removes 1,000 years from a cultivator's lifespan.

However, those are only found in the Divine Heavens. If you'll turn to Page 168 in your Bestiaries, you'll see one that you may need to watch out for here in the Mortal Heaven: the Harlequin Whip. A bite from one of these in the upper Earth Realms can seriously harm a cultivator as high as the 5th Spirit Realm, and sometimes they do—they are among a small set of magical beasts that are 'blind' to spiritual pressure, so a rank gap cannot deter them.

As you can see, they have a distinct red, yellow and black coloration, similar to a snake species from your world called the 'Coral Snake.' Also like your world, they have an imitator known as the Harlequin Rod. Unlike in your world, this imitator is far from harmless, though it is indeed not venomous. Instead, it can temporarily grow in size to subdue its prey via constriction. Again in parallel to your world, Harlequin Whips scale patterns have small yellow bands between large red and black bands, while Harlequin Rods have black bands between red and yellow bands."

So, I needed to avoid stepping on a red tile right after a yellow one, or vice-versa, as well as not stepping on the same color twice in a row. It was easy enough at the start, but halfway down the hall, the black tiles started to get a lot less common, so I had to carefully plan a route. At the end, there were 8 whole rows without a single black tile at all, so starting from a black tile, I stepped as far as I could to a yellow tile, then I had to make a standing leap of more than ten feet to clear the tiles entirely. Thank goodness I'd done plenty of jumping around in the treetops of Crucible Island last year. Safely across, I took a few more minutes to gather myself before heading up the stairwell.

There, I faced an agility challenge, in the words of the small tablet at the start, I needed to be as cunning and agile as a serpent and avoid magical light beams. This time, I actually got caught halfway through the first time because I misinterpreted the movements of one beam as a pattern, and it instead randomly moved unluckily right where I was going. Fortunately, I was just teleported back to the beginning of the room. I just needed to be a bit more careful, and I made it through the second try without much trouble.