Chapter 186: The White Room
When he opened his eyes, Bella’s beautiful face, the shimmering purple rocks, the quiet serenity of that strange room — all of it was gone.
Aaron found himself standing in the middle of a bustling town. The townfolk were strange in a way that took a moment to fully register.
They had humanoid figures, their heights comparable to humans, though far less varied — each of them hovering around six feet tall, which would have made them giants in the eyes of someone like Nancy.
They moved through the streets with purpose, going about whatever business occupied them, but the moment Aaron appeared among them, they began turning around one by one, their attention snapping toward him like a current reversing direction.
And that was when he got a proper look at their faces.
There were none. No eyes, no nose, no ears, no mouth — nothing that resembled the human features he was accustomed to.
Just a humanoid figure of pure darkness wrapped in white clothing, their entire form shrouded as though light had simply decided not to apply to them.
Their attire was pristine and pale, and the architecture surrounding them followed the same unspoken rule — every building, every structure, every man-made surface existed in strict monochromatic contrast.
Black and white, nothing else, with the exception of the sky overhead and the ground beneath his feet, which seemed to exist outside the town’s rigid colour philosophy entirely.
He barely had time to process any of it.
[ Class Trial has been completed! ]
[ Optional side-quest has been completed partially. ]
[ Beginning the extraction procedure. Brace for the space warp. ]
The warning appeared, but the system extended no actual courtesy along with it.
The surroundings began collapsing almost immediately, folding inward like paper being crumpled by invisible hands, and in the final fragment of a second before everything dissolved, Aaron caught sight of the dark humanoid creatures reaching into the air and pulling black weapons out of nothing — summoned from thin air — and charging directly toward him.
Had the warp taken even two or three seconds longer, he would have been fighting for his life or already losing it. The discomfort of being yanked through space without warning, for once, worked entirely in his favour.
Alyssa was nowhere visible, but he pushed the concern aside for the moment. He trusted Bella enough to believe she wouldn’t have agreed to send Alyssa along only to let her vanish into nothing.
The partial completion of the optional mission, though — that one genuinely stumped him. Bella had made her position clear.
There had been no romance, no signal that she harboured anything beyond mild tolerance and perhaps a thread of amusement toward him. So how had the system registered anything at all?
He didn’t have an answer by the time he opened his eyes again and found himself back in the white room where everything had started.
Plontis was already there, leaning against what appeared to Aaron to be an invisible wall, his arms crossed and his expression carrying that particular blend of curiosity and disbelief that tends to emerge when someone has just received news they weren’t prepared for.
"Optional mission was partially completed? Boy, what did you even do?" Plontis asked.
Aaron pressed his fingers to his forehead, still feeling the residual unpleasantness of the warp working its way out of his system.
"I don’t know," he grumbled. "I am as confused as you. Why did it partially complete when she showed no romantic signs towards me?"
Plontis studied him for a long moment, his gaze steady and probing, as though searching the space between Aaron’s words for something worth catching.
But Aaron was being as sincere as he knew how to be, because genuinely, he had no idea what had triggered the partial completion.
The system could be bugging out.
"I guess we can leave the discussion about that to Lady Karen," Plontis finally said, the topic apparently not worth any further investment on his part. "It was a mission from her side and it’s her job to judge the rewards for completing it partially. As for my side of rewards..."
He trailed off, swiping one hand through the air, and a window materialized directly in Aaron’s line of sight.
[ Class trial has been successfully completed. ]
[ Class upgrade is in process. Some system functions will temporarily be on standby. ]
[ Class skills: Unusable. ]
[ Exp gain: Unavailable. ]
[ Inventory: Can be used. ]
In every story he’d ever consumed, these things happened instantly. A flash, a fanfare, immediate results.
He clicked his tongue inwardly at the reality of it, then turned to Plontis and offered him a curt, reluctant bow. "Thank you, sir Plontis."
Plontis waved a dismissive hand. "Wait here silently till Lady Karen replies."
"Yes sir."
It wasn’t as though he had a choice. Without Plontis, this featureless white box offered no exits, no edges, nothing to work with.
So Aaron drifted toward the nearest wall and felt his way to it slowly, the complete absence of visual reference making the short distance feel strangely disorienting even with perfectly functional eyes.
Ten long, excruciating minutes passed before Plontis received any response at all, and when it came, it arrived in the form of two words. Just two.
’I see.’
Nothing after that — no instruction, no elaboration. When Plontis followed up to ask what was to be done with Aaron, the silence that answered him was total.
Aaron watched the faint tension settle into Plontis’s expression and found himself thinking that some problems truly were universal regardless of which world or dimension you happened to be standing in.
Another thirty minutes crawled past.
Aaron attempted small talk at one point, if only to make the time move faster, but Plontis received each attempt with the enthusiasm of a man being asked to give up something precious, and the conversation died each time before it could take any shape.
So Aaron gave up on that and let his thoughts drift toward Alyssa instead.
His system was locked down, most of its functions suspended during the class upgrade — but then something clicked into place in the back of his mind.
One function was still available.
He’d had access to it this entire time and hadn’t even thought to check.
He pulled up the inventory tab.
[ Inventory: 6 / 5 ]
Six items. He only had five slots. The number sat there, calm and impossible, and Aaron stared at it for a moment before the implication settled fully into him.
Only one being he could think of would have the sheer capability to brute-force her way through his system’s limitations without triggering a single alert, without him noticing even a flicker of interference.
The same being who could have erased him at any point during his stay and simply chosen not to. The thought carried a chill alongside its logic — if she’d left one invisible fingerprint on his system, there was nothing stopping her from having left others.
He shook the thought off and focused on the inventory itself, examining each slot in turn.
The swordstaff.
The light bulb containing the nightcrawler’s venom.
The backpack.
The suitcase.
The mimic’s corpse. And then — the sixth slot, sitting where no sixth slot should have existed, containing a small cartoonish drawing of a humanoid figure with a distinct little bulge on top of the head. Colourless, simple, unmistakable.
Alyssa.
But living beings couldn’t be stored in inventory. That was a fundamental rule, not a guideline — the kind of restriction that shouldn’t bend for anyone.
And yet there she was, slotted neatly into a space that shouldn’t have been able to hold her, which meant only one thing.
Bella’s last words surfaced in his memory before the conclusion even fully formed.
"Well... if she dies again, just submerge her into a nourishing bath."
One plus one. The answer arrived quietly and without ceremony.
Alyssa was already dead.
She could be revived — he was already mentally drafting the composition of the bath he’d prepare for her — but the knowledge still landed with weight.
Time didn’t pass inside the inventory, so her condition wouldn’t worsen.
That much was a relief. But the guilt arrived anyway, unhurried and unwelcome, settling into the spaces between his thoughts.
She had died once already because of his carelessness, his instinct to shove her into the safety of his pockets, without thinking through what safe actually meant.
Bella had brought her back. And now here they were again, the same result reached by a different road, and his choices had contributed to it both times.
The guilt curdled into frustration before long, because there was nothing to do with guilt in a featureless white room with no exits and a man who treated words like a finite resource he was conserving for emergencies.
An hour had passed. More than an hour. And he wanted to go home.
He wanted to see Claire and Eva, find out how much time had elapsed, and revive Alyssa properly. There were things waiting for him and here he was, sitting in a box.
"How long is your empress going to take, sir Plontis?" Aaron asked, keeping his teeth from grinding together through conscious effort alone.
"She will take as long as she wants to take, boy. You will wait until she decides what to do with you," Plontis replied, his voice carrying the flat, immovable quality of a man who had never once in his life been in a hurry.
"But it has already bee—"
"Oh my." The voice arrived like something poured rather than spoken — sweet, melodious, threading itself through Aaron’s sentence and cutting it cleanly in half. "The young mortals sure are impatient~"