Broken Lands

The options for the second Treasure Challenge were Capture, Evade, and Find. Sophia thought she’d done pretty well on her first Treasure Challenge, which was a Find, so she picked that again. She didn’t really want to do another maze, but at the same time at least she knew how to handle it.

A moment later, she stood on a small floating island just above the clouds. Water poured off the island to one side, seemingly coming from a group of multicolored crystals nearly her height that glowed only a few feet from where she appeared. Similar islands floated around her, but the one directly in front of her was different: it also held a glowing ring shaped like a huge portal entrance that looked like either crystal or metal; the mana that flickered around it like lightning made it hard to tell which.

It was pretty, but Sophia had no idea what she was supposed to find. There wasn’t a convenient mechanical Archon to tell her, either.

Maybe the World Tree would?

Sophia pulled up the Event Hub page, then relaxed. That was exactly what she needed.

Treasure Challenge: Find

The Gate opens at Noon.

Find your way through it.

It wasn’t exactly the most clear description; in fact, it was far less clear than the directions in the previous Treasure Challenge. In a way, that made sense; the Item Manifestation Treasure was useful for all of them and was probably far more expensive for the World Tree than the Event token.

Completing the Challenge probably meant opening a portal in the ring on the island directly ahead of Sophia. The “easy” way to do it that anyone could do was to wait; the Challenge said it opened at noon. The sun was visible past the portal structure, which meant it was probably past dawn even though it made colors in the sky as if it were still quite early.

At least, Sophia hoped that it was dawn and not sunset. If it was sunset, getting to noon would take a lot longer.

On second thought, that didn’t really matter. If all she could come up with was to wait hours, it would be better to back out and try one of the other options, since the Treasure Challenge didn’t penalize withdrawals beyond the time spent on the attempt. This was a time-optimization trial, not something you could purely fail. Waiting for noon would be a very bad use of her time.

Sophia moved forward, only to stop again almost immediately when the clouds between the island she stood on and the island with the ring shifted up, forming a series of steps between the islands. She’d expected to fly, but if it gave her steps she could use, she wasn’t going to argue with it.

She summoned her wings just in case, then stepped onto the first cloud. It was surprisingly sturdy and even non-slip, though cool and slightly damp. The next step was the same, as was the one after that. When she was a bit over halfway across, Sophia hopped up into the air and flew the rest of the way to the portal island.

It was almost disappointing that nothing tried to stop her, but at least it told her something important. She could take the steps or fly, whichever she preferred.

The only truly interesting things about the space were the portal-ring and the crystals that grew all over the place; maybe they were linked?

No, cancel that, of course they were linked. She’d also left out the clouds and the sun, but those both already served their purpose; the clouds were the routes between islands and the sun was a marker … wait. Maybe it wasn’t the crystals and the ring that were linked; maybe it was the crystals and the sun. Or maybe this whole thing was on a pivot of some sort and the island would tilt to bring the sun overhead? It might even be all of the islands and the clouds; after all, she couldn’t see what was below the clouds. Maybe there was nothing there at all.

Sophia opened her eyes and aura to the mana around her. It was everywhere, but the first thing that was obvious was that the sun was definitely not a real star. It was a mana construct, and one that was even less “real” than the constructs that surrounded her. They were solid; it wasn’t. It was made solely of mana and was basically a giant magelight; it didn’t even give off noticeable heat, which she really should have noticed earlier.

It was, however, moving. Sophia could see that, even though the movement was very slow. There were lines of mana that connected it to all of the crystals she could see as well as the portal; that was probably one clue to the Challenge.

It had to be possible to complete the Challenge without manasight or waiting, but it wasn’t immediately obvious how. The last Find challenge required her to track; this one required her to find something without knowing what she was looking for or where it had gone.

Or did it? What if the crystals were what she had to find and she just had to find the right crystal? That meant identifying it somehow.

Sophia reached out to the crystal next to her and watched the “sun” carefully. If anything, it moved slower than before. This definitely wasn’t the right crystal, but it gave her a clue.

She tried to push some mana into the crystal. It accepted it, but all that did was slow the sun down even more … if that was even possible. It might even be stopped right now. That clearly wasn’t the answer unless she found a crystal that made the sun speed up.

The next ten minutes were spent testing the crystals on the portal island, which all slowed the sun down, and the other three other nearby islands, including the one she started on. One crystal per island seemed to speed the sun up, but it was a very small increase that was only slightly greater when she added mana. Adding mana to one of those crystals might cut the time necessary for the sun to reach its zenith in half, but that was it.

The crystals that sped up the sun were all the same color as it, predominantly yellow with a hint of orange. That made the next step faster: checking the outer ring of islands. There were a solid dozen of them, and they each had a single yellow crystal. Weirdly, most of them didn’t speed the sun up; some of them even seemed to make it move backwards. There was a pattern to it; the ones that made it move forward the most were the ones to her right and rear, with the one behind her having the best effect. The one directly to the right of that was the worst, even though the one to its left was only slightly worse than the one behind where she started.

She paused for a moment to sketch the layout, then sighed. The outer islands formed a clock, with 12 noon behind her when she appeared. Directly to the right of that would be the 1, so of course that was backwards; it must be far later than 1. She wanted noon, after all, and it seemed it was only doing the morning hours. There was an excellent chance that she could use the other hour-crystals to move the fake sun … and that they’d stop it when it reached the “time” they indicated.

She made her way to the correct crystal and pushed some mana into it to speed things along. It moved even faster than she expected, as if it knew she’d solved the puzzle by finding the correct crystal.

All told, that particular Treasure Challenge took twenty-three minutes, far less than she expected it to take. Sure, she’d used her manasight a bit, but it wasn’t necessary. Using her mana to speed up the actual completion once she figured out which crystal was the right crystal was more impactful, and even that probably only saved her ten or fifteen minutes. It was entirely possible that someone else could have saved those same minutes without her mana if they figured out the “clock” setup, but Sophia still felt pretty good about her completion time.

Those minutes she saved added up as she moved on to her next planned Treasure Challenge, then the one after that. Every single one was different and most of them had no obvious connection to the object she was going to receive. The specific Challenge she selected always played into it somehow, and “Find” turned out to be one of the better words for her; it was probably good for anyone with perceptive Abilities, and her magesight was definitely one of those.

No matter what word she selected, most of the Treasure Challenges had a relatively quick solution. There were a couple that she had no idea how to approach and exited to try a different word in the first few minutes, but other than that they all went smoothly. The feathers went especially quickly; while she never quite reached the three minute record time the World Tree mentioned, she was able to complete several of them in about five minutes each.

By ten hours into the Treasure Challenges, she had the four major items she’d picked out for herself and feathers from all fifty-two of the Challenges that rewarded either a feather component or an item that was heavily feather-based. She’d even managed to help Xin’ri pick up the automaton and found time to get both an off object that Xin’ri pointed out that created pulses of mana (or, as Xin’ri said, plumes of mana) and a second Item Manifestation Treasure.

She could pick up more feathers, and she certainly would, but even she could admit that she didn’t really need all of the feathers she could possibly get. It was time to pick up some things she wasn’t sure she’d need and help Xin’ri with her list, which was split between items she wanted to work with and things she thought would be valuable to sell.

Dav, Xin’ri, and Ci’an were also doing quite well, though Ci’an in particular had to retry a few more Treasure Challenges than the other three; she simply didn’t quite have the flexibility they did. She was still beating the hour average, but not by as much as the others. Too much of her Nightowl Sphere was tied up in weakening enemies, so even though she definitely had the best eyesight, she didn’t have some of their other advantages. Incredible eyesight simply wasn’t quite as useful as Sophia’s manasight or Dav’s perfect memory and ability to walk through walls.

The other teams had a few people performing as well as the Flying Stars, but most were at Ci’an’s level or even worse. In the last few hours of the Treasure Challenge, the Flying Stars pitched in to help Lith’e and Ssssit get the last few things they really wanted. It turned out that neither superior stealth nor plant magic was all that helpful in the Treasure Challenges, so those two mostly had to do the far longer default methods to complete Challenges and they had average completion times closer to two hours per Challenge than one.

When the timer finally ended and kicked her out of the one last Treasure Challenge she tried to fit in, Sophia had her tent pack itself up, picked up the last few things she had sitting out, and left the Treasury gratefully. She badly wanted to visit the inn they were staying at.

Specifically, she wanted to find the bed and fall into it.

Twenty-six hours of Challenges was fun but exhausting and she was pretty sure she’d made a lot of mistakes the last few she completed, even if she wasn’t sure what they were. It would have been much better if they could pause it once they started so they could sleep, but that wasn’t an option.