Chapter 59: Spatial Loop
[YES / NO]
The system asked me to choose, but I hesitated for a moment.
The words unstable transmuted mana didn’t exactly sound safe. In fact, it felt like the type of thing which could accidentally hurt Viora instead of helping her.
But then again... This was also the first real opportunity I had gotten since awakening the system, and mutated traits were definitely far stronger than normal ones. So, without changing my expression, I selected YES inwardly.
Ding!
The screen that was being displayed vanished instantly.
At first, nothing happened. My fingers were still buried inside the goblin’s chest while Fox, Tan, and Black kept their gaze on me.
Then, suddenly, the crystal hidden inside the corpse trembled. The system was starting to begin its work.
The crystal began dissolving silently into particles and began to flow directly into my hand. A strange warmth spread through my fingers immediately afterward.
I almost pulled my hand back on instinct alone.
Ding!
As soon as the sensation vanished, a new screen appeared in front of me.
[Mutation Traits Successfully Extracted.]
[Trait Acquired: Heightened Smell]
[Trait Acquired: Toughened Skin]
[Trait Acquired: Predatory Instinct]
[Warning: Traits quality increased due to transmuted mana.]
[Traits has been stored for later use...]
Three traits? And one of them is instinct? That is great. Now I should try to get out of this Gate as quickly as possible.
I slowly pulled my hand from the goblin’s chest and my palm was completely empty.
"You didn’t find anything?" Black, who was looking at me, asked, and I replied with a NO while wiping the black blood onto the goblin’s body.
For a few moments, he didn’t move his gaze away from me and after a bit, he just shrugged his shoulders.
"Forget about it," Black finally said before turning away from us. "We should clear this Gate before it gets dark."
Both Fox and Tan looked at each other before also following after him. And having no other choice, I also decided to go with them.
Black walked ahead of us all. I could notice that Fox and Tan were keeping their distance from him. And Black also didn’t blame them. After all, who would want to get crushed with just the flick of a finger?
....
As we walked through the not-so-green forest, the atmosphere around us slowly began to change.
It wasn’t some dramatic change in weather or something like a different place. No. It was still a forest, but the only difference was that unlike before, the trees now had leaves on them.
Still, instead of being green, they were soft red, and with every small breeze, some of them got separated from the branches and levitated in the air before settling down on the ground.
The tree trunks were still black, and the ground was still cracked and scorching hot.
Although we had mainly been looking for monsters to appear so that we could kill them and exit the Gate, nothing like that appeared.
’It can’t be that the goblins we encountered were the only monsters here?’
That was just a possibility. Because it would have been understandable if it was a normal Gate. But taking the Transmuted Gate into account completely changed every expectation.
’There has to be at least more goblins or one strong monster for this kind of Gate to be justified.’
Though we walked for more than half an hour in a straight way, we found ourselves in the same place where we had fought the goblins before.
I knew because the corpses were still lying on the ground at the same place where we had left them.
"What is this?" Tan muttered under his breath, and Fox added, "How did we come back here?"
They were confused, of course. Instead of finding new monsters to fight, we got the old dead ones. Moreover, we somehow ended up where we had started.
This didn’t make any sense. How could we come here when we didn’t even take a U-turn?
There has to be something going on here or something we didn’t know yet.
I moved my gaze all around myself and Black was also doing that. When we were walking and the trees began to change, I had seen something, but I didn’t pay it much attention.
Now that I think about it, I can see the same thing standing past the trees.
It was a barrier, which went from the ground up to the sky and was covering everything around us.
That tells me there is some requirement or goal here which isn’t fulfilled yet.
"It is the barrier," Black let out as he noticed the barrier too.
"Yeah, do you have any idea why it is here?" I asked and waited for his answer. However, he just shook his head slightly.
’So he also doesn’t know? That makes it difficult.’
"Hmmm..." I began to think about everything from the story which I could remember, but there wasn’t much about a Transmuted Gate since they only appeared twice or thrice at most.
So there was nothing I could think of. But that was only until the system told me something unbelievable.
Ding!
[Warning: Spatial loop structure detected.]
[Current zone classification: Closed-cycle Transmuted Sub-Gate.]
My eyes narrowed instantly. So that’s why we returned to the corpse site.
"It is a loop," I said under my breath and Black’s gaze sharpened slightly. "You noticed it too?"
Fox and Tan looked between us and said in unison, "Loop?"
I pointed slightly toward the ground where the dead goblins still lay. "We didn’t walk in a circle. The Gate forced us back. The space itself is repeating."
"So we’re walking inside a maze we can’t even see?" Tan asked and I corrected him.
"Not a maze, something far bigger."
This wasn’t just a dungeon mechanism. The Gate wasn’t randomly trapping us. Nor was it something like a time loop.
"So, what are we supposed to do?" Fox asked and in response, I walked toward a tree and sat down while leaning against it.
"We just need to wait."