Somewhere in the Labyrinth.
A young girl dressed in white casual clothes stepped out of the Level 1 Train.
Her long hair was tied up, radiating a faint warmth under the sunlight with a pale golden hue.
Her emerald green eyes struggled to open against the scorching glare.
However, the most eye-catching thing about her was not her temperament or her looks, but the fact that she was not carrying a backpack.
Instead, a long Baguette was slung across her back.
It was a somewhat abstract sight.
“It’s so bright…”
The girl shielded her eyes with her hand, taking a moment to adjust to the light.
Looking around, she found herself in a space enclosed by stone walls on three sides, with one side open.
The rough stone walls stood 7 or 8 meters high.
When she tapped them with her hand, they barely made a sound and felt incredibly hard, suggesting they were quite thick.
By now, the Train had already disappeared.
The mission for the Trial Site had to be completed; there was no turning back.
“Sigh… how did I end up in a Level 4 Trial Site?”
Grumbling about her luck, the girl left through the only available passage.
The moment she took her first step out of the area where the Train had stopped, her heart skipped a beat.
Something felt faintly wrong.
At that exact moment, she felt her negative emotions being magnified.
No matter how hard she tried to calm herself, she became unavoidably flustered.
Thinking about her Mental Power, the girl opened her Personal Panel.
…As expected.
On the panel, the data in the Spirit column was decreasing at a slow speed.
Although it was very slow, she was currently navigating a Labyrinth.
She had no clues yet and no idea how long it would take to find an exit!
‘At this rate, my 9 Spirit won’t even last 2 hours!’
She took a few steps back into the initial space, and as expected, her Spirit stopped decreasing.
However, staying there would mean being trapped in the Labyrinth forever…
After a quick mental calculation, the girl gritted her teeth.
She entered the passage ahead at the fastest speed she could maintain without exhausting herself and began to explore the Labyrinth.
But soon… she was completely turned around.
For some unknown reason, every time she entered a fork in the road only to find a dead end, she would forget which path she had just taken by the time she turned back.
She even encountered different forks in the road on her way back.
This wasn’t going to work.
Under the scorching sun, the girl’s body was already sticky with sweat.
In this state, her Spirit began to drop even faster.
Even her other attributes were falling more rapidly.
This negative debuff affected more than just Mental Power!
After walking into yet another dead end, the girl finally reached her breaking point.
Finding a patch of shade, she leaned against the stone wall to rest for a while.
Once she was out of the sunlight, the thin strands of her hair returned to a lemon-like yellow.
A flash of determination crossed her emerald eyes.
She pulled out the Baguette from her back and gripped it in her hand.
Talent activated —
The 1-meter-long Baguette was thrust straight into the stone wall!
Then, she sliced with force!
The hard stone wall was cut into a semi-circle as if it were a block of tofu.
The girl kicked the cut stone, but it didn’t budge.
In a fit of pique, she used both hands to shove it forward with all her might.
The massive stone block, roughly 70 or 80 centimeters thick, was slowly pushed out!
From the other side, the wall looked like another dead end, but for the blonde girl, this was a new path!
She drank two gulps of water to recover her energy and continued her search for the Labyrinth’s exit… or the statue mentioned in the Station mission prompt.
An unknown amount of time passed.
The girl hit another dead end.
Just as she was about to pull out her Baguette, she heard the voices of two men on the other side.
She immediately froze, holding her breath and remaining perfectly silent.
“Big Brother, do you think we can really find the way?”
“Shut it! Don’t say such unlucky things. We have the Restorative Potion we got from that treasure chest last time. Why would you worry about not getting out?”
“Right, Big Brother.”
“Not only will we get out… we’ll have other gains as well.”
“By opening treasure chests?”
“You’re stupid! It’s not certain if we can even find a chest. Even if we do, opening it would just alert others… If we ambush people at the finish line, the chest will be ours, and everyone else’s supplies will be ours too!”
“As expected of your foresight, Big Brother!”
“Of course. Heh heh heh.”
As the voices grew distant and finally vanished, the girl finally breathed a sigh of relief.
She waited a while longer before she continued cutting through the stone wall.
That conversation sent a chill down her spine.
She had run into a group of villains in this Trial Site.
Although her Talent was powerful, she lacked a long-range weapon.
Fighting two people by herself was too much of a stretch.
She had to clear the Labyrinth faster than everyone else!
She glanced at her Personal Panel; her Mental Power was already more than half gone.
She took a deep breath, trying her best to calm her irritation and frustration.
She adjusted her state of mind, keeping a level head.
The Baguette pierced into the stone wall.
“Yuan… this isn’t working.”
Mu Bai saw that her Mental Power had dropped to 15 and was already feeling the pressure.
To recover as much as possible, she had been holding Ye Yuan’s hand, but it was like trying to put out a fire with a cup of water.
The consumption of Mental Power was accelerating, and the contact of a single hand was soon unable to balance the recovery with the loss.
Ye Yuan’s Spirit was only 7 points; their margin for error was not actually that high.
“Mhm. I’ll carry you.”
“Your physical strength…”
“It’s enough.”
Under the influence of the Mental Power debuff, neither of them wanted to speak too much.
Seeing this, Mu Bai stopped hesitating.
She tossed her backpack aside, keeping only the essentials in her hands, and then wrapped her arms around the neck of the crouching Ye Yuan.
Ye Yuan stood up, supporting Mu Bai’s legs.
“Hold on tight.”
“Okay.”
At every fork in the road, Mu Bai used a dagger to carve a mark on the stone wall of the passage they entered.
If a new fork appeared behind them, she marked the path they had already traveled.
This Special Dagger was the one Mo Cha had given her back then; she had forgotten to switch it back at the Weird Station.
Although the size, weight, and even the shape were the same, there were subtle differences in the patterns.
The dagger was very sharp, enough to be thrust into the stone walls.
Mu Bai had considered carving through the walls, but the dagger was too short, and doing so would likely cost more than it gained.
In this way, every time they entered a dead end and came back out, even if they forgot which passage they had taken, they could tell which path was unexplored through the marks.
Slowly, Mu Bai drew a map of their traveled route in her mind.
Their luck wasn’t very good, as they kept hitting dead ends, but the difficulty of this Station was clearly centered on the Spirit and physical energy consumption debuffs.
For anyone else, this would be a major problem with no solution, making the Level 4 difficulty well-deserved.
But for them, with the existence of the golden Talent, [Power Bank Constitution], the time cost of trial and error wasn’t that important.
As long as the two of them stayed close together, their physical strength wouldn’t drop too severely, and their Mental Power would actually rise.
Time passed, and the hands of the Mechanical Butterfly Watch had turned for a full 7 or 8 hours.
The two of them each ate a little food to line their stomachs.
The sunlight was gradually weakening; night was about to fall.
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