Chương 23: The Death Room, and an Optimization Problem

The massive thirty-meter stone gate parted, revealing thousands of square meters of open space inside the Outer Archive. There was no continuous floor. Stretching out before the two of them were hundreds of hexagonal stone tiles, glowing faintly, drifting in a bottomless violet abyss. Each tile bore a different cluster of Silver Dialect characters, constantly shifting position along strange geometric paths.

Deep in the abyss below, threads of silver spatial lightning occasionally flared, crackling with a sound cold enough to raise the hairs on the back of one's neck. Sylvia stopped at the edge of the starting platform, both ears pinned flat in high alert. She threw an arm out to block Lucian, her tone more serious than he'd ever heard it.

"Master, this is the Outer Ring Linguistic Matrix. According to the old records, one wrong step onto an incorrect tile triggers the defense mechanism — the intruder loses 20% of their mana and is knocked back to the start. Fail five times, and your entire mana reserve empties out, sending you straight down into the abyss." Lucian propped his chin in his hand, studying the hundreds of drifting tiles.

"What's the traditional method for solving it?" Sylvia drew a deep breath, her chest rising.

"The only method is reciting all four hundred stanzas of the Great Rift Epic from memory. Each stanza corresponds to a permutation of the star positions. We have to stand here and calculate it step by step... If I remember correctly, it takes about six hours to work out the safe path." With that, the archivist closed her eyes, lips already moving, preparing to intone the first stanza. Lucian, standing beside her, let out a long yawn. He narrowed his eyes at the stone matrix ahead.

'Syntax Weakness Detection' instantly converted the ancient characters into numbers, displayed directly in his field of vision. Each tile carried a value from 1 to 8. Every three-second oscillation cycle, two adjacent tiles would light up, compare values, and automatically swap places if the leading tile's value was greater than the trailing one's. Lucian blinked twice. Bubble sort. A basic sorting algorithm. Entry-level programming homework for first-year computer science students, back in his previous life.

The thing Sylvia's entire clan needed six hours and four hundred stanzas of scripture to decode was, in reality, nothing more than a basic array-sorting routine, coded in for fun by some pre-war engineer.

"Hey," Lucian said, reaching over and grabbing Sylvia's wrist. Sylvia's eyes flew open, the first line of the epic catching in her throat.

"Master? Which passage do you want me to start with—""Six more hours puts us past lunch. Let's go." Before the archivist could process what was happening, Lucian had already pulled her forward. Thud. Lucian's foot landed on tile number 2. It lit up a soft, calming green — position confirmed correct. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Without pausing a tenth of a second to think, he pulled Sylvia hopping to the tile on the right, spun past a tile mid-swap in the center, then landed three quick steps in a row across tiles drifting along the vertical axis. Green. Green. Green. Sylvia was dragged bodily through the air, her legs staggering to keep pace with each of Lucian's jumps. Her flowered skirt whipped over the bottomless abyss, her sapphire eyes going dizzy watching dozens of tiles flash approving green beneath their feet, one after another.

She never got a single line of the epic out. She hadn't even had time to remember the name of the second constellation. The ten-year-old ahead of her hopped along, muttering strange fragments under his breath.

"Loop i runs from 0 to n minus 1... swap adjacent elements... skip the conditional branch... done." Thud! Lucian's boots landed solidly on the granite platform on the far side. He let go of Sylvia's hand, brushed off the hem of his cloak, and pulled out his pocket watch to check the time.

"Forty-five seconds. Three seconds slower than projected — your footwork was a little heavy." Sylvia stood frozen on the platform, trembling head to toe, her silver ears drooping against her cheeks. She looked back at the thousand-square-meter matrix still flashing brilliant green behind them, then at the child calmly pocketing his watch. Forty-five seconds. Four hundred stanzas of her ancestors' sacred verse... a thousand years of the Silver-Winged clan's greatest scholarship...

just casually skipped over by a ten-year-old dragging her along by the hand in under a minute. The archivist's heart swelled with equal parts overwhelming shock and her people's pride, mercilessly trampled underfoot. Ting! Ting! The matte-black System v2. 0 panel appeared before Lucian's eyes: [OUTER RING LINGUISTIC MATRIX SUCCESSFULLY BYPASSED.] [Achievement Unlocked: Spatial Programmer.] [MILESTONE REWARD:] Learning Rate ×2 (143, 992 → 287, 984) New Skill unlocked: 'Speed Reading' Lv.

1 (Fast Reading) Effect: Allows scanning and full memorization of 10 pages of magical text in 1 second. A cool, sharp current of sensation ran straight into Lucian's forehead. Reaching 287, 984 Learning Rate brought a clear shift to his perception: every ancient character around him no longer needed word-by-word translation — his brain now parsed and translated the language the instant his eyes touched the text. Lucian looked around the Outer Archive's great hall.

Thousands of rustproof titanium-alloy shelves, rising all the way to the ceiling, held countless scrolls of ancient hide and metal plates. This was the place where the original pre-war spatial technology records were kept — a time when humanity had still known how to program the rules of reality directly, before that knowledge degraded into stiff, memorized magic circles. Behind him, Sylvia took a deep breath to steady herself. Her pride still hurt. She had spent years learning the Great Rift Epic.

Lucian had looked at the same structure, called it "bubble sort," and crossed it in forty-five seconds.

"Bubble sort," she repeated quietly, testing the unfamiliar phrase. Lucian glanced back.

"Terrible algorithm. Still better than four hundred stanzas." Sylvia decided she was not going to dignify that with an answer. Lucian tested his new 'Speed Reading Lv. 1' skill, letting his gaze sweep across the nearest shelf of hide scrolls. Ancient elvish script... volumetric compression techniques... transmission network schematics... In a single half-second glance, the complete contents of three thick scrolls were fully logged into the System's data archive. At this rate...

cracking a new language is a job of a few days, tops. He was about to move toward the next shelf when the stone floor beneath his feet suddenly shook violently. BOOM... BOOM... The heavy clash of metal against metal, mixed with the grinding screech of arcane gears, echoed from deep within the corridor leading to the Central Sanctum. The smell of ancient machine oil and blistering heat rolled out from the darkness. From around a bend in the stone corridor, a massive bronze-black shape emerged — over six meters tall.

Its body was cast from a single block of alloy, its long arms dragging along the ground like the trunks of ancient trees. Its face had no features at all, just a single magical eye burning with a deep, furious red. The red eye swept across Lucian and Sylvia, and a low, mechanical voice tore through the air. [WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED INTRUDERS DETECTED. ACTIVATING ELIMINATION PROTOCOL.]