Chapter 149: Inside A Monster
Malik wasn't sure if he had lost consciousness or not.
The pain had been too great for him to focus, a blinding, all-consuming fire that had eaten through his hand and crawled up his arm, devouring him entirely.
He remembered... falling, this spiral of liquid rot swallowing him, some kind of black lightning flashing above as he dropped into darkness.
Then nothing.
Now, the fire was gone.
His hands remained, whole and healed, no doubt thanks to Safira's relentless work even in her incredibly delirious state.
The ache was still there, a dull throb beneath the skin, but it was manageable.
Malik was in the seventh layer.
Somehow, he hadn't crashed or fallen.
He hadn't landed at all. He was simply here, standing on solid ground as if he had always been standing here; it was almost as if the journey through the fog had been nothing but a dream.
The sky was entirely gone.
There was no ceiling, no stars, but no darkness.
Instead, there were just endless, towering slabs of stone rising up on all sides; their surfaces were rough and dark, and their peaks were lost in a haze that might have been miles above or inches from his face.
It was impossible to tell.
All of it was stone.
They were in a labyrinth, one with walls that curved in ways that made absolutely no sense.
Some leaned left, some leaned right, some seemed to fold back on themselves, creating impossible geometries that hurt to look at for too long.
A God had taken this... fortress, folded it into itself a thousand times, and left it here to rot.
And though it rotted, it was still alive.
Because yes, the labyrinth breathed, though quite unlike the layer that came before it.
Malik felt it before he saw it, a deep expansion of the walls around him, lungs filling with air.
The stone groaned with a resonant sound that vibrated through his bones. Then the walls contracted, the space between them shrinking, and black dust poured from the cracks.
An exhaled breath.
Each inhale dragged a storm of black dust through the corridors. Each exhale closed up one of the pathways, the walls grinding together, threatening to crush any intruder caught between them into paste.
Stranger yet, this land held strange gravity.
Unlike the third layer, where down was up and up was down, nothing here was constant.
Malik glanced to his left and saw a chunk of stone floating sideways, defying every law of physics he knew. To his right, a corridor angled upward at forty-five degrees, yet the dust falling from its ceiling drifted sideways.
Everything was completely random.
From the way the dust moved, each gargantuan corridor was different.
Relative to the others, Malik was currently standing sideways on a wall.
The ground beneath his feet was actually a vertical surface, but to him, it felt perfectly normal.
His body had adjusted without his permission, reorienting itself to whatever surface he stood on.
He looked up, or what he thought was up, and saw Huda and Safira standing beside him, their bodies also tilted relative to the true horizon.
They didn't seem to notice.
Their senses had adapted too.
Perhaps this was a test of the mind as well.
A land with a time limit, where the black dust was the sand falling in an hourglass, and the seeker was the bottom half of that hourglass, slowly being filled up.
Corrupted.
Malik sighed at all of those observations and finally looked at Safira and Huda, who were staring at him.
They seemed speechless.
The two just stood there, their eyes fixed on the old man next to them, their mouths slightly open.
Uncomfortable silence stretched out, and Malik could see the questions forming behind their eyes.
Just how many times was he going to save them?
It was getting very hard to ignore his secrets.
The way he had sensed the Venerable, the way he had resisted the Abyssal King's Will, the way he had known exactly how to escape the fog.
None of it added up for a random old man seeking a Rune.
But even then, even Huda managed to quell her curiosity.
"T-Thank you."
She thanked him.
A miracle had just arrived.
Huda, who had called him a Demon and a stalker and bad luck, who had accused him of making demonic oaths and bringing disaster, was thanking him.
Malik didn't comment on it.
He simply nodded, his expression unchanged.
Safira let out a sigh and touched his right arm, her hands glowing with a familiar soft light.
"We could have never made it without you."
While saying that, she made sure he was fully healed.
Her magic seeped into his skin; it was her all, knitting together any remaining damage, soothing the ache in his hand, replenishing what the black fire had taken.
Once done, she pulled away and smiled.
"We'll reward you with any Rune you want once we get out."
Malik nodded at her, not knowing what to say back.
He didn't want any extra Rune, well, at least not now.
His own Runes hadn't even been fully unlocked yet.
Adding another would just complicate things.
But he couldn't tell her that.
He couldn't tell her anything.
So he just nodded.
With that, the three of them focused back on what mattered most.
Their survival.
And to ensure that, they needed to plan things out.
Thankfully, unlike the sixth layer, they seemed to know more about this layer's exit.
Safira's expression had shifted from gratitude to calculation as her eyes began to scan the shifting corridors.
"Although it might not seem like it, this realm has rules."
That surprised Malik, completely going against his earlier observations.
But if Safira said there were rules, he believed her.
She raised a finger, telling him to focus on the ground.
Malik looked down.
The rough stone beneath his feet was covered in a thin layer of black dust.
That was something he already knew, but he didn't question it and waited.
Eventually, after a few minutes, he felt a tremor.
It started small, barely a vibration in the soles of his boots.
Then it grew, spreading up through his legs, reaching his skull.
The walls around him groaned again, and the dust stirred.
"This."
Safira pointed at the distance.
"It comes roughly ten minutes apart."
A corridor seemed to be closing, its walls grinding together.
"The exit moves in accordance with it."
Her words were no speculation. They were matter-of-fact, spoken with the certainty of someone who had studied this place, learning its secrets through teachings passed down from those who came before, Malik himself... the one who remembered.
This was an ever-changing labyrinth with a life timer.
Because yes, around them, the whole labyrinth kept shifting.
Corridors opened and closed, walls expanded and contracted, the black dust swirled and settled in patterns that at first glance seemed random but really weren't. There was order here, hidden and buried, but present.
There was also another rule.
"This black dust you see comes in fixed intervals."
Malik watched it while she explained, his eyes tracking the way the particles moved through the air.
They drifted in streams, almost like water, flowing from one wall to another, pooling in corners and then dispersing.
"Every three seconds, then seven, then ten, then twelve, and then back to three again."
He counted what he had only just glossed over.
The pattern was precise and surprisingly unvarying.
It looped exactly as he had described.
"That signals, well, not the path per se, but the window."
Safira continued with his observations.
"The right path can only be accessed when the cycle resets."
Malik touched the wall beside him.
The stone was warm... it was sweating Rukh.
Droplets of raw energy beaded on the stone and trickled down, evaporating before they reached the ground.
Alive.
Earlier, he had thought it was a metaphor.
It wasn't.
This labyrinth was actually a living, breathing thing.
The layer's exit wasn't being carried for the sake of it.
It was an organ shifting inside a beast's ribcage.
Malik's hand lowered.
He almost couldn't believe it.
'I'm inside a monster.
The corridors were its vessels, carrying Rukh and dust and whatever else this creature needed to survive. The powerful tremors were heartbeats pushing life through stone veins. The dust was its breath, exhaled and inhaled in those fixed intervals.
'Incredible.'
He truly was inside a beast.
And that meant the key to solving this puzzle wasn't about finding the right corridor or the right path. Direction didn't matter when the walls themselves moved, making every landmark temporary.
It was a matter of timing.
These vessels opened and closed at regular intervals, like valves in a heart.
The cohort needed to move when the vessels were open and stop when they closed. They needed to be at the right place at the right time, not the right place in space, but the right place in the cycle.
The fourth interval.
When the dust came for twelve seconds, that was the window.
That was when the path forward revealed itself.
Malik smiled softly.
"I'm ready."
They couldn't waste any time.