Aetherios System: Whirlwind

Chapter 72: Sigil-Binders

He decided to check out the middle passage quickly once he made it back up the three-way-fork outside the laboratory cavern. Just as he had suspected, it lead to a room with a door at the far end that blocked his progress. It was a circular room with a single pedestal at the center. All appearances pointed toward this being the way to the boss room, at least that’s what Obby was able to figure out once he was jacked into the Glyph-port inside the room.

The giant circular door covered in pulsing glyphs was also a bit of a dead-giveaway.

“Right hand passage it is then.” He quickly left without activating anything else and went towards the right-hand reflective passage instead.

The next door slid open with a grating sigh of rock on rock, revealing a narrow corridor that pulsed with faint white light. He ducked under the threshold and stepped into a rectangular chamber.

Two walls gleamed opposite each other. One carved from obsidian-black stone, veined with dormant runes. The other, across from it, shone like white crystal soaked in moonlight. On it pulsed a pattern of glowing glyphs, floating mid-surface like veins of molten gold suspended in water.

Obby highlighted the Glyph-port since Alex was distracted the rooms visuals, and the sentient construct mentally dove into the hologram glyphs the moment he touched it, the port blinking once.

“Ah. The Reflected-Pattern test. Classic mirrored glyphwork. You know this stuff. ”

“What’s the catch?”

“You copy the glyphs, perfectly mirrored. Carved into the empty wall by channeling your own aether, stroke by stroke. ”

He stared at the display. The glyphs were looping through short, complex sequences of angled sigils and radial flares. A few bore the stylized sweep of command clusters, sigils that controlled other sigils.

“I asked, what’s the catch, what if I mess up?”

“The feedback loop punishes mistakes by rebounding miscast aether into your mind. A flashback of your own energy but reflected wrong. It mostly causes cognitive noise. Each mistake makes it harder to think clearly. ”

He drew in a breath. “Perfect.”

Approaching the blank wall, his fingers twitched, the glyph stylus appearing from his bracelet into his hand.

Obby watched. “ You’ve done reverse mirroring before. On all of those aether crystal etchings. ”

“Yeah, but that was on stable crystals, not live system-bound stone in a psychic dungeon. And that was with a spell ingrained in my mind by The System, not some new glyph sequence I’ve never seen before.”

“Then consider this your practical exam. ”

Alex raised his hand, letting his aether stir through the stylus. The chamber’s ambient energy curled inward, attracted by his intent. The glyph pattern across the room pulsed once, brighter, as if acknowledging that he had started.

He began. His first stroke was clean. It was the same with the second.

The aether at the end of his stylus tool glowed blue-white as he carefully traced the inverted direction of a sweeping arc glyph, its spiral had to curl counterclockwise here, even though the source wall spun clockwise.

Reverse mirroring wasn’t just flipping symbols. Some glyphs were directional , others symmetrical. S ome inversely attuned to the orientation of the glyph directly before it. One mistake and the system would feed him his own miscast energy like poison wine. His hand trembled only slightly.

“Focus, ” Obby said. “ Ignore the light shift. It’s baiting you. They jitter the reflections every few seconds to throw off your rhythm. ”

“I noticed,” he whispered to the room.

Three glyphs down. Then four.

The fifth was a twist-runed tri-form, with an anchor that required tracing its negative space and not the symbol itself. It was a rather tricky one. The mirrored illusion on his wall began to pulse red, warning him he’d hesitated too long.

He grit his teeth and went for it. A notification blared.

There was a flash of pain, white-hot energy lancing through Alex’s arm and into his mind like a livewire overloading. Not enough to harm him, but in his head images flickered. His own memories, twisted about in strange ways. He saw a classroom. A scream. Someone’s boots in blood.

He blinked hard. “Damn it.”

“First flashback always hits hard. Push through. ”

“I’m fine.”

Six glyphs down now. His thinking slowed, but his hands moved by instinct. Obby was right, he’d practiced this. Hours of hovering over aether crystals with the little pebble gremlin barking orders about proper anchor inversions and mirrored logic spirals.

Seven glyphs down.

He rotated his stylus to reverse-curl, a spike loop, then flicked upward for the punctuation glyph. Blue light surged down the traced channel like ink racing through paper veins, but it held. Eight glyphs down.

The last glyph was simple: a single-point stabilizer. It shimmered on the reference wall like a closing eye. Alex inverted it in his mind and let the aether fly. The chamber went silent, he held his breath in his chest.

The System chimed.