old room

Please use your mind to construct that room.

That fine, slender, solid room.

With your own soul as the antipode, build the room among the distant stars.

It cannot be named there, cannot be called.In a dark and deep place where projections cannot be cast in the real world, your room may attract the attention of "His".

The sacrifice is not important, what is important is your own existence.

That which cannot be called will knock at your door, and as a guest it will answer your questions, even if they are riddles unsolvable for eternity.

……

Remember and firmly believe that there will be nothing within the room that can hurt you, destroy you, engulf you.

……

Ah, good luck to you.

=============

Maybe I'm going to die right now.

The young mage apprentice, hapless Alvin Reeves, heard a voice echoing indistinctly in his skull.

He couldn't quite tell if it was hallucinations, or if he was actually talking to himself.

At this moment, he is trembling and hiding in his dirty and narrow room: there is no bed, no window, only near the ceiling, there is a hand-wide air vent, and the black iron fence divides the thin rectangular The vents are cut into five neat squares, but only very occasionally, will there be wind blowing from the vents.The floor and walls are rough stone bricks, and the gaps are full of unknown slime and strange dark green moss. The air is always filled with a damp smell that seems to fill your lungs with water.

Ivan and his former roommate (a sea gnome who always looks a little crazy), tied one corner of the cloak to the fence of the vent, and tied the other end to an iron hook on the other side of the room for unknown purpose superior.

In fact, Aiwen always thought that the iron hook was used to hang corpses. He had seen many similar iron hooks on the wall of the tutor's room. After cutting the throats of those unlucky experimental subjects and hanging them upside down on the wall, their blood vessels The liquid in it drained cleanly.But of course, when the occupants of this room hung their cloaks on the iron hook and barely used it to make an extremely uncomfortable hammock, neither Aven himself nor his roommates ever mentioned the mentor. Those iron hooks on the wall of the room.

The so-called hammock is really uncomfortable. Sleeping on it for an hour or two can make you clearly hear your lumbar spine moaning in pain, but at least its existence can keep Ivan away from the humidity, and Those unknown poisonous insects stalking in the dark - but now he is not sleeping in his hammock.

He was bending his body, curled up in pain in a corner of the room, panting continuously.

Alvin used to be a pretty good-looking young man.

He was tall and well-proportioned, with handsome features, and with his light green eyes and black hair, he looked almost like a nobleman.But that's just "once", now Evan Reeves can only be described as miserable or tattered.

Blood stained half of his body red, and his hair and shoulders showed an ominous scorched black color due to the burning of the magic fire.

And the reason why Aiwen had to keep curled up in this way was because he had to hold his stomach with hands that had almost no strength—his palm was against the open wound, and some slippery things fit together. Seeing blood kept wanting to leak out-Ivan sincerely hoped that it wasn't his intestines.

Just a quarter of an hour ago, a deformed triangular devil almost tore his stomach open.

Thankfully, Ivan escaped at the last moment, but the fatal wound was still there, and reminded him with pain that he needed a healing medicine.

And sometimes even he himself doesn't know why the young countryman who finally detected the talent of the mage, the young apprentice who walked into the gate of the greatest mage tower in the North despite the admiration and envy of others , will be reduced to the present ghost.

"You know, at first I thought I would become a great mage..."

Alvin started talking to himself again, and he was trying to keep himself from passing out.

At the very beginning when he entered the Mage Tower, he thought that what he had to face was just ordinary embarrassment and harshness.But everyone knows that as a low-level apprentice at the bottom of the Mage Tower (maybe only slightly better than those wailing experimental subjects), this kind of embarrassment and harshness from the mentor is almost as natural as the existence of water and air .Frail human beings need water and air and food, just as a lowly apprentice needs the censure and insult of a master.

But Aiwen didn't expect that embarrassment and harshness would soon escalate into varying degrees of deliberate difficulties and pervasive corporal punishment-the mentor assigned to him was a skinny and creepy old man.

It didn't take long for Aiwen to realize that the obvious incompetent person like his mentor would be the most troublesome existence. After all, one side is a junior mentor who is nearly sixty years old and still hovering at the bottom of the mage tower, while the other side He is a young and surging mage apprentice with a bright future.

You know, sometimes the jealousy of human beings is more terrifying than the venom of scorpions.

The instructor became keen to let Aiwen participate in various dangerous experiments: for example, let Aiwen, who has not even mastered low-level fireball skills, carry a feed bucket to feed a highly deformed Triangle Demon. (Even the slugs know that in the perception of the triangular devil, a fragrant human like Ivan is the real feed.)

Well, if Aiwen hadn't secretly learned the first few versions of the little fireball, I'm afraid he would have really become the feed of the Triangle Demon by this time. Of course, it is more likely that he has become the experimental material of the "mentor".

Obviously, for mentors, humans like Aiwen are more suitable as raw materials for experiments rather than clumsy apprentices.If it weren't for the strict rules set by the master of the mage tower, I am afraid that Ivan would have died many times.

But Aiwen knows that there is not much time left for himself: No matter how strict the rules are, there are always loopholes, just like the rules will protect the fragile and stupid apprentices, but they will not protect the corpses of the apprentices after they die, especially The corpses of apprentices who died due to debris and incorrect experimental procedures.

These days, the instructor's eyes on Aiwen have become more and more gloomy and muddy.As a very smart young man (for the sake of the goddess of magic, he managed to survive until now), Aiwen guessed that his mentor had planned countless "accidents" for him, so as to get his corpse.

"Damn..."

Thinking of the mentor, Aiwen couldn't help but groaned in pain. He groped with one hand and broke away a loose stone brick in the corner, and then took out a fish skin bag from inside.The dusty fishskin pouch was unsurprisingly from a sea gnome, as evidenced by the disgustingly thin scales on its surface.Ivan took a small breath, and reached into the slippery bag.It took him a long time to finally touch a test tube, and the rippling dark purple light in it showed the fact that the healing medicine was not new.

But Evan didn't care.

He crushed the cork with his teeth and swallowed the medicine. With the unique tingling sensation brought by the healing medicine, his eyes began to go blank.

And that parchment slipped out of the bag at that moment.

Ivan glanced at the book, and then another.

The fish skin pouch was a gift from his hapless sea gnome roommate, who mysteriously disappeared years ago.And before disappearing, the poor guy went crazy, he kept talking nonsense, screaming and avoiding something that didn't exist in the void.His crazy fear even alarmed several mid-level instructors. Those arrogant mages tried their best and failed to detect anything in the void. The consequence of wasting the instructor's time was that Aiwen's roommate was finally locked in a closed room. A dungeon of all spells and latitudes.

He was supposed to be made into some kind of special experimental material, but before the final execution, he was in that small secret room out of thin air. It is said that after opening the secret room, the entire wall of the room was covered with his pale green Blood and scales, it was obvious that he had been tortured, but still no one could find anything other than scales and blood in the Chamber of Secrets.

This matter has become a certain mystery in the bottom area of ​​the mage tower. No one knows where he went in the end, but after all, this mystery has not caused too much disturbance among this group of apprentices who are walking on thin ice (although Aiwen knows that the mentor is almost because of maddened by this incident).

And Aiwen inherited all the inheritance of the sea gnome almost unceremoniously.As early as the very beginning, he counted the things in the fish skin bag, the most precious of which were the healing medicines that had expired for a long time, some other low-level medicines, and some shells. The fine carvings on them were probably the sea gnomes The unique text in the book, and some unimportant gadgets, including the parchment book.To be honest, although this book is full of all kinds of jokes and nonsense, it can be regarded as the only thing that can be called interesting in the pile of junk in my roommate.

Well, that's right...

Jokes and gossip.

Ai Wen commented on the content of this book in this way.

At least Ivan thought so before today.

The whole parchment is written about one thing, how to construct a room in your mind that doesn't exist.

Then "project" that room into an imaginary place in the starry sky.

According to various obscure hints in the parchment, that starry sky is an indescribable thing, an area where gods that cannot be summed up in words and thoughts exist (this paragraph is really too fucking obscure, Ai Wen can only guess roughly).

And if your luck is good enough...or bad enough (so the parchment says), those gods may be aware of the existence of the "room".

They will manifest from the void, knock on the door of the room, and walk in, answering all your questions.

Because they are beings so great and terrifying that words cannot even describe them, any question you ask will be answered.

But...you don't know which gods will charge you for their answers.

[Just in case, it may be safer to prepare some sacrifices. 】

In the corner of that page, the previous owner of the parchment, Ivan's former roommate, wrote notes.What made Aiwen feel a little uncomfortable was that that line of writing seemed so rigorous, and it could even be seen from it that the writer was extremely serious and cautious at that moment.

(oh please...)

Alvin heard the voice in his mind muttering again.

Probably because of the serious injury this time, Ivan was a little surprised to find that his thoughts were on the sea gnome throughout the night, oh, yes, and the parchment.

(Maybe I should try it.)

After a while, Ivan realized that he was thinking so.