In the Taskmaster's place, a small pile of loot shimmered on the cavern floor. Silence, thick and heavy, settled over the party.
Then came the chime of commerce, cutting through the tension.
[Party Notification: 15 Silver has been looted. Each member receives 3 Silver.]
[Loot Acquired]
[Taskmaster's Cracked Pauldron] x 1
[Foreman's Sturdy Trousers] x 1
[Minor Mana Potion] x 2
Kage felt the coins land in his inventory, a hollow clink in the vast emptiness of his finances. It was progress, but the kind of progress a man makes baling out the ocean with a teaspoon.
"Right then," Zara said, her voice a model of recovered composure. She pointed a finger at the pile. "Potions to Lily and me. The pauldron is crafting junk, but might fetch a few coppers from a blacksmith. The trousers…"
Her eyes, along with everyone else's, landed on Kage.
Jax grunted, a noise somewhere between a cough and a protest, but said nothing. He had lost the right to complain when his life was saved by a man who looked like he'd get winded carrying a sack of groceries.
Lily picked up the leather leggings and offered them to Kage with a small, encouraging smile. "You should take them. You earned them."
He took the item without a word. A quick mental command brought up the stats.
[Foreman's Sturdy Trousers]
Quality: Uncommon
Type: Leather Armor (Legs)
Weight: 1
Armor: +5
Stats:
+2 Stamina
+1 Strength
Durability: 20 / 20
Requirements: Level 4
Description:Thick, hide trousers reinforced with scraps of metal. They belonged to a goblin foreman who valued durability over comfort.
He equipped them. It was a minor upgrade, laughably so compared to the gear Jax was probably wearing, but it was functional.
Kage felt his HP nudge from 140 to 160 with the new +2 STA, and his STR went to a barely-respectable 13.
"Okay," Zara said, pocketing her mana potion. "Let's keep moving."
She started to take the lead, then stopped, catching herself. She glanced back at Kage. The hierarchy had shifted.
Kage gave a single, curt nod towards an unlit tunnel.
The party followed without question.
The tight, oppressive squeeze of the fissure lasted only twenty feet before opening into a space so vast and unexpected it stole the breath from their lungs.
The world became a silent cathedral of starlight trapped in stone.
Kage's own perception supplied the thought before the Operator could suppress it. The cavern was a geode of huge proportions, its vaulted ceiling a distant sky of colossal, phosphorescent crystals. Ghostly blue-green light bled from glowing flora, painting the immense space in ethereal hues and casting shadows that were like pools of pure, liquid silence.
He stood at the very edge of the precipice, his mind a battlefield between the world his class was showing him and the world his logic insisted was real.
"Whoa…" Finn's voice was a hushed whisper, echoing slightly in the immense chamber. "It's… kind of beautiful, isn't it? In a terrifying, 'one wrong step and you fall forever' sort of way."
He was right. The cavern floor was gone, replaced by a chasm so deep that no light penetrated its depths. It was a void, a slice of pure blackness cutting the world in two. A series of stone platforms, remnants of some ancient Dwarven sky-road, formed a broken and treacherous path across the abyss. Rusted chains dangled from the ceiling, leading to mechanisms choked with age and neglect.
Jax scoffed, punctuating the sound by kicking a loose stone off the ledge. It vanished into the blackness without a sound. "Great. We're lost. This is what you get for following the flower-picker into a random hole." His voice was laced with its usual arrogance, but his posture was tight, confrontational. He was following, but he was making sure everyone knew he was doing so under protest. "The EXP-per-hour here is probably zero."
For the first time since entering the mines, the path forward wasn't clear. There were no more goblins to kill, no obvious corridor to follow. There was only the chasm and the silence.
Naturally, all eyes turned to Kage.
He stood at the very edge of the precipice, his grey avatar a stark, unmoving silhouette against the ethereal blue glow. To the others, his stillness was a font of reassurance, the calm eye in the storm of their uncertainty. He looked like a leader contemplating his next masterful stroke of strategy.
He was not.
Kage wasn't admiring the view or pondering the mysteries of the deep. He was running a risk assessment. His eyes were cataloging anchor points, measuring distances, and calculating the probability of the rusted chains snapping under their combined weight. The Operator was at work, breaking down the sublime into a series of quantifiable variables.
He pointed to the leftmost platform. "This one first. One at a time. Jax, you're heaviest. You go last."
No one questioned it.
They moved with the careful, deliberate steps of a bomb disposal unit, hopping from one stable platform to the next. The stone was slick with condensation, and the silence was so complete that the scuff of their boots sounded like an avalanche.
After securing a foothold on a particularly large, stable island of rock halfway across, Kage paused. A sprawling patch of the glowing flora covered the nearby wall.
[Gloomweed]
EXP on legs, Kage thought. He couldn't afford to pass it up.
He gestured for the party to wait, then knelt before the glowing patch. The others watched, confused, as he placed a hand near the fungus, his expression one of intense concentration.
He'd refined the process. No more wasted breath or emotional outbursts. It was all about intent. He pictured the flora's internal structure, the flow of nutrients, the microscopic process of its life cycle. He focused on the concept of acceleration.
Title: A Command to the Weed
Poem: Growth
[-50 AWN]
A soft green light pulsed from his palm, bathing the Gloomweed in its energy. The fungus trembled, its blue glow intensifying for a moment before a section of it matured and detached into his waiting hand.
[You have harvested Gloomweed x3]
[Harvesting (Basic) EXP +1.5%]
[EXP Gained: 6]
A chime, clear and satisfying, echoed in his mind.
[Your 'Basic Harvesting' skill has reached Level 3!]
[EXP Gained: 50]
His experience bar nudged forward. 571/800. It was a slow grind, but it was progress. More importantly, it was efficient.
He repeated the process. Again and again. The verse was the same, the intent was the same, the result was the same. He was a machine, converting Awen into EXP, one handful of glowing fungus at a time.
[You have harvested Gloomweed x3]
[EXP Gained: 6]
After the tenth successful harvest, a familiar itch of optimization prickled at the back of his mind. He was being efficient, but was it the most efficient? He pulled up his class window, navigating to the Poet's Lexicon to check the numbers. The data would tell him the truth.
He scrolled down to the [Growth] keyword. His eyes narrowed.
[Keyword: Growth]
[Conceptual Resonance: 7% (Academic)]
It hadn't moved. Not by a single decimal point.
He checked again. He had started at 4% after his desperate outburst by the stream. The first few applications in the field, refining his intent, had pushed it to 7%. But since then? Nothing. It was a significant sample size. The resonance should have ticked up to at least 8%.
An error? A bug?
His mind immediately discarded the possibility. Crown of Destiny's systems were supposed to be ruthlessly consistent. If a number wasn't moving, it wasn't a bug; it was a rule he didn't understand yet.
He cross-referenced the data. His [Artistry] stat was 34. The verse was simple. The target was low-level. The failure rate was zero.
The variable wasn't in the execution. It was in the repetition.
The system is penalizing me.
The realization was as cold and clear as the cavern air. The game was blocking him from finding an optimal solution and spamming it. It was demanding novelty. A factory assembly line produced the same result every time, but the worker never became a master craftsman.
Stagnation. The word surfaced in his mind, feeling less like a game mechanic and more like a personal affront. Stagnation was inefficiency. It was a net loss. This class had a built-in limiter against the very essence of grinding.
To increase his understanding, his Conceptual Resonance, the application of the keyword had to be different. The intent had to be more potent, more nuanced. He couldn't just tell things to [Grow]. He had to understand how they grew, why they grew, and apply that understanding in a new context.
This is not a skill tree, he thought, a flicker of genuine frustration mixing with his analysis. It's an exam. And every question is different.
He filed the critical data away. This was a fundamental law of his class. A new, deeply annoying problem to solve. He stood up.
"Done," he said, turning back to the chasm. "Let's move."
The stable path ended abruptly. Before them lay the heart of the puzzle: a fifty-foot gap in the rickety bridge. On the other side, the path continued into a tunnel carved into the far wall. The only way across was a series of large, square platforms suspended from the ceiling by thick, rusted chains. They were motionless, hanging uselessly over the abyss.
To their right, built into the cavern wall, was a massive, clearly Dwarven mechanism. It was a tangle of bronze pipes and enormous gears, all covered in a fine layer of dust and decay. A housing for a central cog, at least three feet in diameter, sat conspicuously empty. A hefty activation lever, large enough to require two hands, was jammed in the 'off' position, fused to its console by a thick bloom of orange rust.
On the floor in front of the console was a series of nine pressure plates, arranged in a three-by-three grid.
Zara was on it instantly. "Okay, classic environmental puzzle," she muttered, already pacing around the plates. "Weight distribution puzzle, most likely. The number of plates suggests a sequence. Maybe it corresponds to the number of platforms? Jax, stand on the top-left one. Finn, middle-right."
Jax grumbled but complied, stepping onto a plate. It sank with a grating sound, but nothing happened.
"This is a waste of time," Finn said, nocking an arrow. He took aim at a rocky outcrop on the far side of the chasm. "Let me just try to get a rope across."
He loosed the arrow. It flew true, but the grappling hook at its tip sparked uselessly against the far wall. The stone there was unnaturally smooth, polished by centuries of moisture, offering no purchase. The arrow clattered off and vanished into the darkness.
"Damn it," Finn sighed.
Zara was growing visibly frustrated. "These plates could be a red herring to waste our time. The real key is probably the missing gear. It has to be a quest drop from a mob somewhere in the mine." She threw her hands up in exasperation. "Which means we got the drop RNG wrong. We can't solve this without backtracking."
To a min-maxer like Zara, being forced to backtrack because of a missed random drop was the ultimate sign of failure. It was wasted time, a dent in their overall efficiency.
But Kage hadn't moved from his spot, his eyes flitting between the empty gear housing and the rusted lever.
Problem one: a missing component.
Problem two: a seized mechanism.
Systemic power had failed. The Fighter's strength couldn't break the rust, the Ranger's Agility couldn't cross the gap, and the Mage's Intellect couldn't decipher a puzzle with missing pieces. It was time for The Architect to take the stage.
He walked past Zara, ignoring her muttered hypotheses, and stopped before the Dwarven console. He looked at the pile of debris at its base—loose stones, discarded metal shards from the crumbling architecture, and a few of Finn's failed arrows. Raw material.
He focused on the empty housing where the great gear should be. He didn't know what a Dwarven gear looked like, not exactly. But he knew its purpose. He visualized a wheel with interlocking teeth. A crude, functional, temporary replacement. He didn't need it to be perfect.
His intent was that of an engineer in a crisis, improvising a solution with whatever was at hand.
Title: Create Gear
Poem: Shape
[-75 AWN]
The Awen cost was higher than his previous uses. This was a more complex concept.
A deep indigo light pulsed from his hand. The pile of debris on the floor began to tremble. Stones and metal shards levitated, surrounded by a shimmering aura. With a terrible grinding sound, they began to press together, shards of metal bending and stone chipping away as the verse forced them into a new reality. It wasn't elegant.
The mass compressed, twisted, and formed into a misshapen but undeniably gear-like object. With a heavy, final CLUNK, the newly formed cog, ugly and jagged, slotted itself into the empty housing. It looked like it would shatter if you sneezed on it too hard, but it was there.
[Poet's Lexicon: Keyword [Shape] Resonance increased. (3%->4%)]
The party stared, speechless.
"No way," Finn breathed.
Kage moved to the lever. He could feel Jax's incredulous stare burning into his back. He placed a hand on the rusted metal. He thought about the nature of rust. It was a form of decay. Slow, inexorable, a weakening of iron. He was simply going to speed up the process.
His intent was precise: to weaken the bond of the rust, to compromise the very integrity of the decay.
Title: A Command to Iron
Poem: Weaken
[-50 AWN]
[Poet's Lexicon: Keyword [Weaken] Resonance increased. (3%->5%)]
A faint, sickly purple light enveloped the lever. The thick cakes of orange rust turned to fine powder and cascaded to the floor, revealing the dull bronze of the lever beneath. Kage wrapped both hands around the grip. He gave it a firm, steady pull.
The lever moved.
There was a shriek of tortured metal as the crude, temporary gear engaged. It groaned, it smoked, it sounded like it was about to disintegrate into a thousand pieces. But it held. Deep within the chasm, ancient mechanisms rumbled to life.
With a series of deafening clanks, the suspended platforms began to move, sliding along hidden rails, locking into place one by one, forming a stable, predictable bridge that spanned the entire chasm.
The path was open.
Silence. The only sound was the faint hum of the now-active machinery and the gentle drip of water somewhere in the darkness.
Lily was the first to speak, her voice barely a whisper. "How… how do you even think of that?"
Zara just shook her head, a slow, disbelieving motion. A small, incredulous smile touched her lips. It was the expression of a mathematician who had just seen someone solve an impossible theorem by writing a limerick. All her data, all her assumptions about game mechanics, had just been rendered obsolete.
"That's not a class skill," she said, her analytical mind finally rebooting. She pointed a finger at him. "That's not a pre-written spell. You're not a Poet. More like a programmer. You don't just use skills; you write new ones on the fly." Her eyes were wide with a new, profound level of respect. "That's a rare class, right? Or… unique."
Kage simply gave a short, single nod, his expression as unreadable as ever. His gaze was already fixed on the path ahead.
He turned and stepped onto the first moving platform, his boots making a solid, reassuring sound on the stone. The job was done. The next objective was waiting. The rest could follow.