The Room of Infinite Regression (1)
The first thing I saw upon entering was a gray space enclosed by square stone walls. As I looked around the empty interior, a single sheet of paper fluttered into view right before my eyes.
<Guide>
Welcome to the Room of Infinite Regression.
If you wish to escape this room, please familiarize yourself with the rules before departing.
Guide? I picked up the paper and read its contents.
Rule 1. You cannot escape this erosion until you clear the final room.
Rule 2. If you die while traveling through the rooms, you will regress to the past.
Rule 3. The starting point of regression is the first room.
Rule 4. Upon regression, all items you have obtained will disappear.
If you die, you regress to the past no matter what? Being able to revive with all limbs intact even after your throat is slit sounded sweet at first glance. Having to lose everything and start over from the beginning was annoying, but it was still better than losing your life.
But it’s not necessarily a good thing. The room’s name itself was Infinite Regression. No one knew whether the regressions would number in the hundreds or the thousands until they tried it themselves. If you were lucky, you might reach the final room smoothly, but if not, you would be trapped in an endless prison of death, never able to escape. It was packaged as giving challengers infinite chances, but in reality, it was no different from a curse.
Rule 5. Per traveler’s life, you may skip three rooms.
Rule 6. ■■□■□■□□■
Is Rule 6 encrypted? Judging by the symbols covering it, it seemed like important information. I’ll probably find hints as I explore. After reading the final rule, I tucked the guide into my robe. As if on cue, a skeleton appeared in the center of the stone chamber. The skeletal soldier, clad in crude helmet and armor, held a sword in its hand.
“I shall slay you and offer your soul to my master!”
Its eye sockets glowed with a fierce blue light. Scattering an aura of death like a rotting skeleton risen from the grave, the creature charged at me. I didn’t move. I didn’t dodge. I simply designated a single point inside the skeletal soldier’s skull—its empty, brainless cavity—and detonated it.
「Point Explosion」
An offensive spell that strikes the target by bursting a single point in space.
Pop!
The skeletal soldier’s skull burst like a balloon. Its torso and bones collapsed in a clatter. At the same time, a green door appeared on the opposite wall. The number 2 was written on it. It seemed to mean I should proceed to Room 2.
So I have to defeat the monster in the room to move to the next one. But before heading to the second room, there was something I needed to do first. Can’t just leave empty-handed. Among the scattered bone fragments on the floor lay a single dagger—the weapon the skeletal soldier had been holding. I picked it up and examined it. The blade was as sharp as new, with no rust or damage, and the overall craftsmanship was smooth and sturdy. Most importantly, there was a runestone embedded in the hilt.
This is a rune with an absorption effect. Having spent countless hours buried in books at the library, I had read anything that caught my eye. Among them were texts on runes. Drawing from my past life’s experience of memorizing English vocabulary in hopes of someday making use of it, I had studied runes diligently. While the field of runes was vast and my knowledge was only the tip of the iceberg, the rune on this dagger was one I had studied recently and could clearly recognize.
It’s an absorption-type rune. If I could figure out what it absorbed, it might prove useful. Not just an ordinary dagger, but one with a runestone embedded in it. My luck’s been good right from the start. I sheathed the dagger and happily tucked it into my belt. Then I opened the green door and entered the second room.
It was a canyon. Sheer rock walls towered as if piercing the sky. I walked along the path between the cliffs. As I moved slowly, scanning my surroundings, a pained groan reached my ears.
“Ugh…… H-help…… someone……”
My current level was 4 stars. Since advancing to 4 stars, my sharpened senses easily gauged the direction and distance of the sound. Approaching it, I saw a man slumped against a rock, half-collapsed.
“Haa…… P-please…… help me……”
The moment the man spotted me, he begged for help. Clutching his side, he gasped for breath with a pale face. The red blood soaking his flank told me this was an emergency. The first stranger I had encountered in the erosion. A hint of wariness rose within me, but my conscience—clear and pure like first-grade water—was too pristine to ignore someone dying right in front of me. How could a human turn away from another’s suffering? Prioritizing saving a life, I ran toward him.
“Let’s stop the bleeding first.”
As I tried to tear my collar for a makeshift bandage, the man rasped out in a dry voice.
“In my bag…… th-there’s a healing potion……”
His unfocused eyes pointed toward a leather bag lying some distance away. I retrieved the bag, took out a glass bottle containing green liquid, and showed it to him.
“Is this it?”
He nodded vigorously. I uncorked the bottle and poured the liquid over his side. It sizzled, bubbles rising as the foam settled and the wound rapidly healed. Feeling relieved, I was genuinely impressed by the power of the healing potion I was seeing for the first time.
“Are you feeling better now?”
“Yes. Whew……”
Color returned to the dying man’s face. Letting out a deep sigh of relief, he bowed his head to me.
“Thanks to you, I survived. Thank you……”
“It’s nothing. I only did what anyone would do.”
“If it weren’t for you, traveler, I would have lost my life right there. How can I ever repay this kindness?”
I hadn’t really done much—just poured the potion for him. Apparently the potion also restored vitality, because the man quickly regained his strength and stood up.
“We need to leave this place immediately. The Jin race will track my blood and come this way.”
“The Jin race?”
“Yes. I’m an adventurer who came here to gather medicinal herbs. Unfortunately, while digging up herbs, I was attacked by the Jin race.”
The man’s voice was urgent. Trembling as if terrified, he continued.
“I barely managed to escape, but once they mark someone as prey, they’re relentless. They’ll search this entire area to find me. We have to run……”
The man couldn’t finish his sentence. A long spear came flying from somewhere.
Whoosh!
My instincts, sensing the shift in airflow, reacted instantly.
「Barrier」
A blue membrane of light enveloped me. The spear tip, flying at high speed, struck the barrier and bounced away. I traced the direction from which the black spear had been thrown. At one o’clock, atop a tall, bizarre rock formation, stood a figure in a black robe looking down at us. I called it a “figure” rather than a “person” because I felt no trace of living human vitality from it. Though a human body was hidden beneath the black hood, its very existence carried no sense of being alive.
“Hic!”
The man beside me turned deathly pale. Forgetting even to run, he stood frozen, cold sweat dripping down his face.
“Is that it?”
“Y-yes! That’s the Jin race that tried to kill me!”
Gengor’s warning flashed through my mind. He had said that alien races lurked in erosions, and you never knew when a knife might find your back. The Jin race. It had to be one of those alien species.
Kill it. Not just to save the man beside me. Now that the black-robed figure knew of my existence, it would undoubtedly try to kill me too. Why?
—Rule 5. Per traveler’s life, you may skip three rooms.
Killing a person granted a free pass through three rooms. The adventurer and I—eliminating both of us would let it skip six rooms at once. Skipping rooms by killing people was far more efficient than clearing them one by one.
“L-let’s run away right now! Even if you’re a mage, you can’t beat that Jin race!”
“I don’t fight battles I’m going to lose.”
I stared at the black hood. The figure was clenching its hand. Black shadows gathered like wind at its feet and began rapidly coalescing. A mass of pitch-black shadow formed in the air. From within the black smoke, a dark sphere whirled violently and shot toward me.
Whoosh!
I immediately pinched and twisted a point in the air—the spot lying along the sphere’s trajectory.
「Refraction」
The sphere, which had been flying straight, suddenly veered sharply off course. At the exact point where the refraction spell had been cast, it flew eastward instead and slammed into the rock wall.
BOOM!
Fragments of stone rained down. To give the creature no chance to recover, I immediately cast an offensive spell.