Keyhole and Cube
Now that his intuition was dealt with, it was time to figure out how to rewind the dream. Alan kept attempting to leave a mark, and every single time, Taylor came in to wake him.
"Alan, time to get up."
"Dreams really don't move according to your will, do they?"
Repeat.
"Alan, time to get up."
"A dream is, in the end, a function of the mind. If your perception and cognition are sharp enough, you can handle it as you please."
Repeat again.
"Alan, time to get up."
"What matters is imagination."
And again.
But this time, Taylor couldn't even make it into the tent. Alan rose from the bed and looked down.
"There it is. So what can I do with it?"
The shadow sat across from him in the exact same posture. Its breathing rhythm, the position of its arms, the tilt of its neck—everything mirrored him. Watching it, Alan's lips parted slightly.
"Ah. You were trying to destroy my mind and hijack my body, weren't you?"
"The mind is finite. The idea that it's infinite is an illusion."
"If you wanted to wear me down, you should've turned me into some factory child and bored me to death instead. Honestly speaking, I'd rather have more experiences—but then you and Mr. Taylor would worry, wouldn't you?"
"..."
The shadow sat in silence. But Alan knew it was still trying to rewind the dream.
To be precise, only the space outside the tent was being rewound.
"How?"
"Because the dream belongs to me. It seems hard to control while you're inside it, but familiarity changes things. Perception, cognition—and imagination."
Shadow tendrils erupted from beneath the shadow's feet and bound its body tight. The shadow, collapsed on the floor, spoke.
"You do interesting things."
"I plan to make things even more interesting. It's time I found out exactly what you are."
As Alan approached, the shadow rippled uneasily. Like someone who had seen something they were never meant to see.
"Stay away."
"You're my shadow. You shouldn't say that when you're stuck to me all day."
A blue blade sprouted from Alan's fingertip. This was inside a dream—he could feel his mental energy draining rapidly in place of mana. Which meant the faster the work, the better.
"Do shadows feel pain too?"
Alan opened his eyes. His body—no, his mind—was thoroughly exhausted.
"Alan! You awake?"
"Yes."
He answered Taylor's voice from outside the tent and drew in a deep breath. Far more refreshing than the air inside a dream.
After a stretch of peaceful behavior, he formed a blade on his finger and stabbed the shadow in a surprise attack.
Beep?
Box's camera eye swiveled up and down, left and right, scanning its master with what looked like genuine curiosity at the sudden behavior.
Alan watched Box batting away Leopard's pincers, then slipped a hand into his breast pocket. This time, something was properly there.
The cube, once black, had turned pure white. Just like when he had purified the Wish Fragment.
If only it had been a fragment.
Even so, this affair had yielded another achievement: he had built a library inside his dream. It was small for now, but since it existed within a dream, he could read books all night long and Taylor couldn't come nagging him about it.
It was an ordinary breakfast time when Alan opened his eyes slowly and found Taylor poking his face into the tent.
"Alan, you've been sleeping long lately. No—'long' isn't even the word. Even someone training their mana needs a solid six hours in bed."
"That's about what I usually sleep."
"Closing your eyes isn't the same as sleeping. You think I don't know you've been lying there awake, chewing on problems in your head? Times like these are exactly when you should sleep more."
The ruin, presumed to be a military facility, was crawling with mages, and no monsters ever appeared, so no night watch was necessary. Thanks to that, everyone's sleep had lengthened.
The mages, of course, kept their guard up rigorously. Watching Alan's party live in such comfort, they harbored who-knew-what thoughts, but since the group were guests of Lorenzo, they handled them with cautious courtesy all the same.
"Anyway, all that sleep must feel refreshing?"
"Yes."
Taylor had no idea that Alan had established a Dream Library.
It's not some special power. Analyzing the dream curse simply sharpened my lucid dreaming.
Which meant that after waking, he needed to verify whether the contents of the books he'd read in his dreams had been distorted or not. Alan treated it as review and welcomed the chance gladly—and so far, he had never once been wrong.
Alan also planned to keep the matter of the curse secret. If he told Taylor, the old man would only worry—and keeping secrets in reserve meant he could draw on them when something similar happened later.
The problem was the cube from the commander's office. The black haze that had vanished once the curse was broken meant that it had been the source of the nightmare.
Alan carefully took out the cube. They were inside his tent anyway, so no one would see, and the cube itself radiated nothing outward.
Anyone who didn't know better would call it a white toy block.
Box brought breakfast in on a tray, and Shiva, who had been preparing food outside, followed it in.
"Brother Alan."
"Yes?"
"Um... its color..."
"Changed, yes."
"Could it be a Wish Fragment, like before? If so, it is a truly dangerous object."
"No. It's different."
Alan's instincts said the same. So did his left eye, which held the techniques of the great magitech engineer Katan.
If the Wish Fragment was a storm whose trajectory no one could predict, the cube was like a silent mountain. That was, if you compared the flow of power within them to nature.
There was another difference as well: the dark aura that had once coiled around each of them. Where the Wish Fragment's had felt ominous, the cube's had felt like gazing up at the night sky.
If he had to force a comparison, the aura emanating from the Key that Alan had recovered was closer to the Wish Fragment's pre-purification state.
The Key and the Cube were in the same facility, so shouldn't they be similar? Then why does it resemble the Wish Fragment of all things...
While Alan mulled it over, Taylor clinked his utensils to signal he should focus on his food, and Shiva gazed at the whitened cube for a long, lingering moment.
"It was a black that felt warm. It's a shame that it's gone."
"..."
Alan made no mention of nightmares and kept his words spare.
Instead, over his meal, he pondered what ability the cube might hold—the ability the dragon had spoken of. Of course, there was a decent chance that the passage of time, or the Labyrinth's mysteries, had interfered with the cube and swapped out its contents.
I'd prefer that, actually.
Because the Labyrinth only ever handed down trials that could be overcome. Some might feel that the path to a solution was itself unreasonable—but a breakthrough existed all the same.
So who cast the curse—the dragon, or the Labyrinth?
At a clinking sound he looked down to find his fork tapping an empty bowl. At some point, he had cleaned his plate without noticing.
He stepped outside to tidy up and found the mages bustling about in agitation. When Lorenzo's party emerged from the black mist at the ruin's entrance, the commotion only deepened.
Most of the mages tried to follow Lorenzo into the military facility, only to be blocked by the guards stationed at the entrance.
"I understand how you feel, but let's have some patience. Is this any way for seekers of truth, beings of lofty reason, to behave?"
"Then you get lost!"
"Gladly. I'm going in, so you can be the patient one!"
When the fierce pushback came, the guard scowled.
"I'm trying to be civil about this... It's Lorenzo's order. Wait. What are you doing? Disperse and get back to your own work. Now."
The moment Lorenzo's name was spoken, the mages—who had been ready to physically charge the entrance—turned away. Their eyes, however, stayed fixed in the opposite direction of their footsteps, glued to the military facility.
Taylor, who had just come out of the tent, asked,
"What's going on?"
"That's what we're about to find out. If Lorenzo came in person, it must be something fairly important."
"Oh, that? I heard they discovered a new underground floor a few days ago."
"...?"
"Don't give me that look like I never told you. I distinctly remember telling you."
"When?"
"Yesterday, while you were fiddling with your Power Suit. You were too focused to hear, weren't you. Besides, even if you'd known earlier, the mages had it locked down. You wouldn't have gotten in."
"A shame. If we'd found it first, it would've all been ours."
"Well, we operated around the surface floors, so that's that. Where are you going? To watch?"
"Yes."
When Alan arrived at the military facility's entrance, one of the guards, who had been chatting among themselves, turned his head.
"I distinctly said to wait... Hm. You're not one of ours."
"They're the explorers who brought back the Key."
At his companion's explanation, the guard finally nodded in understanding.
"Ah, right. What is it?"
"We're here to investigate the ruin, obviously."
"Entry is on hold for now by Lorenzo's order. You're not our people—you earned investigation rights through your deal with Lorenzo—but this time, wait. It shouldn't take long."
The phrase give up did not exist in Alan's dictionary. He sat down in front of the entrance and practiced carving runes into a steel plate.
Outwardly, their effects varied with angle, stroke weight, and size; inwardly, they varied with one's Mental Image. Using them more effectively demanded ceaseless practice.
Once Alan settled in, the mages who had been hovering hesitantly began to gather behind him one by one. Discounting those on guard duty, nearly all of them had come.
"What in the world is this..."
The guards gaped, flustered, at the crowd—like shoppers lining up for a Black Friday sale—but to Alan, deep in concentration, it was none of his concern.
How much time had passed? The shadow at Alan's feet wriggled.
"Are you listening?"
Alan reflexively generated a blade on his finger and stabbed the shadow.
"What was that for?"
The shadow swelled and took the shape of a mage—the same mage he had seen up on the surface before.
"You startled me so much it just... happened. I'm sure you've had moments like that too, Master Mage?"
"Hm. I'll allow it."
"What brings you here?"
"Lorenzo wishes to see you for a moment."
"Down below?"
"Yes."
There was no chance Alan would refuse. He followed the shadow mage inside, and the line of waiting mages raised their voices.
"What about us?"
"Oh, come on..."
The guards, visibly torn, held the entrance as they had been ordered.
Alan studied the mage as they descended the stairs. The man was clothed head to toe in what looked like living shadow, revealing only his eyes, niqab-style.
"Mind telling me the reason?"
"He'll tell you himself. Down there."
When Alan had first arrived here, the spot where he now stood had been the end of the line—but now, stairs stretched far deeper below.
The entire floor was a single room. Lorenzo stood before a hexagonal pillar, handling something, with magic stones and mana stones piled around him.
As Alan's party approached, Lorenzo turned.
"You're here."
"What is this place used for?"
The room was large enough to hold a football match, and with only a single hexagonal pillar in it, it looked strikingly bare. Looked at another way, though, it meant the pillar was equipment important enough to warrant an entire room to itself.
Instead of answering, Lorenzo pointed at the pillar. Driven into it was the Key Alan had recovered.
"So this is what the Key was for."
"I didn't know either, until we found the new floor. Is that all the appreciation I get?"
Alan's eyes darted to a spot right beside the Key. A square recess had been carved into the pillar, and the cube looked like it would fit snugly inside.
At the edge of Alan's vision, a bespectacled mage gave a small wave. It was the woman who had come to the commander's office after hearing about the drinking session.
"I assume you obtained something up there. If my guess is right, that something can fill that hole."
"Let's see the result first, then talk."
For Alan, satisfying his curiosity came before everything else. Besides, Lorenzo's suspicion was already brimming over; a lie would have been useless.
He slotted the cube in, and with a smooth mechanical whir, the hexagonal pillar unfolded sideways. A black rectangle roughly three meters tall and ten meters wide took shape, reflecting the figures of those standing before it with perfect clarity.
Lorenzo gestured to a well-like structure that had formed along one side.
"Magic stones."
At his command, his subordinates dumped in the magic stones.
"No response!"
"Mana stones."
They hauled out the magic stones and poured in the mana stones instead. The moment Taylor muttered, That's easily worth over a billion...
Whuum!
The rectangle turned transparent, revealing a new scene beyond. It was a place packed with specialized equipment, and just like here, it was crawling with mages.
Lorenzo beckoned, and the mages on the opposite side...