The train thundered on down the tracks, gradually drawing closer to the two massive stone doors at the end of the tunnel. The doors slowly opened wide as it neared, and the train passed through, barrelling on into oblivion.


    When he passed through the doors, Lan vanished. His whole world went dark, and suddenly he was ported to the next step. It was a feeling he had grown accustomed to lately, so the strange, weightless limbo didn’t scare him as much as it once had.


    But as he travelled through the nothing, he felt a soft tug on the corner of his robes. It was so light he almost missed it, but there was no wind in the blackness and nothing for the robe to snag on. ‘What was that?’ Lan reached down and pulled on his robe, untangling it from whatever was grabbing him.


    Before he could investigate any further, the current took him, and he was whisked away. Space blurred, and suddenly, he was in a vast throne room lit by the reddish glow of magma.


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    Alert: Fifth Step Completed! The Fifth step tested speed and decisiveness. The reward will reflect this.


    Reward: Based on time elapsed, 6 hours / 24 hours.


    Therefore, 18 dexterity will be rewarded for a quick finish.


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    As Lan felt the strength flow into him, his nerves became more sensitive and his muscles more responsive. He focused on where this strength was coming from. But even when he paid attention, he couldn’t figure out how it was happening. The strength seemed to rise from within him, but how that was possible, he couldn’t tell.


    “Hey!” He heard a girl shout and stopped focusing on his rapidly increasing dexterity. Lan looked up and was shocked to find Thea yelling at him.


    She stood on a distant stone pillar above a colossal crater filled with stone spires. Lan was standing atop an identical pillar on a distant side of the crater. From up above, the crater looked like a bed of nails, with barely any gaps between the huge stone spikes.


    “Thea?” Lan shouted back, “What are you doing here?” He felt stupid asking. What else could she be doing in the sixth step?


    “I’m having a picnic with my best friend, Harriet!” Thea joked, pointing to another pillar where a girl was meditating with a stern expression.


    Harriet opened one eye slowly, “I’m not her friend,” she said firmly.


    “Right…” Lan’s mind raced as he tried to figure out if Thea being here was good or bad. On the one hand, he was killing two birds with one stone. Killing Thea would mean another person lost the title and help him pass the Sixth step. On the other hand, he knew Thea’s ability; even before getting Epiphany, she was strong. He could already tell she wouldn’t be an easy bird to kill.


    “No hard feelings, Thea!” Lan shouted.


    “Why would there be hard feelings? I’m going to win!” Thea yelled back.


    Lan smiled and got ready to fight. He wasn’t sure how the sixth step worked yet, so-


    The ground rumbled, and the pillars slowly lowered down into the crater. At the same time, the voice boomed once again.


    Welcome, Challenger, The Sixth Step is yours to overcome. The first giant was born from this pit, and her throne remains here. She once ruled over all beneath the earth, but after fleeing to the surface world, her throne lies empty. In a final act of spite, the first giant destroyed the crown her mother gave her and hid the pieces within this room. She placed guardians before the five parts, which must be assembled for the crown to be whole again.


    Lan groaned, ‘Nothing valuable is ever just left alone. There’s always some annoying guardian. I’m getting sick of this formula,’


    To complete the sixth step, a sole Pathfinder must wear the crown and sit on the throne for five minutes. This must be completed within 24 hours, or all participants will fail. Hidden within this room, beneath the stone spikes, are paths that lead to parts of the crown. Time is short. Happy hunting.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    When the voice had finished talking, the pillars were completely lowered into the pit, and Lan couldn’t see the other two anymore. He had a rough idea of where they might be, but the crater was vast and impossible to see across because of the forest of stone.


    At that moment, Lan was conflicted. ‘Should I go after the girls now or let them collect the crown pieces and steal them later? As long as I have at least one myself, they will have to come to me at some point.’ He considered just hiding and letting them collect every piece of the crown but decided this was a bad idea.


    ‘If the guardians are high level, then the girls will probably level up after defeating them, making it far harder for me to kill them. I should probably get at least one piece of the crown myself and see how much I level up before I make a decision.’


    Time was pressing, both inside the sixth step and outside it. Lan had spent close to a day in the fourth step and six hours in the fifth. This meant that he had less than six days until the tutorial ended. With a lot still on his plate, he couldn’t afford to waste time waiting for the others to get the crown. Every hour he bought here would pay dividends down the line.


    With his decision made, Lan started to wander through the forest of stone spikes. He could hear the distant sound of shattering stone, ‘That must be Thea’s approach to finding the crown pieces. She’s just going to break the spikes till she finds one… but I feel like there’s a better way to do this,’


    Lan thought it over, he had an affinity with earth now, so perhaps he could use that in some way. Every time Thea destroyed a distant spike, vibrations would rattle across the basin, through the rock and up Lan’s legs.


    From the vibration alone, Lan could get a sense of how far away she was, which gave him an idea. If he could replicate that, would it be possible to sense his surroundings using his affinity to earth?


    He gave it a go, infusing a minuscule amount of mana into his footsteps as he walked. The mana travelled along with the vibrations of his steps and bounced back when it hit something, namely, a stone spike.


    ‘I should be able to find the entrances quicker with this method!’ Lan grinned and began increasing the mana he infused in his steps. The more he put in, the more comprehensive a range he was given of his surroundings.


    After acclimatising to this skill that resembled echolocation in a way, Lan began sprinting between the many stone spikes, feeling intently for any signs of an entrance. He noticed that every time he walked past one particular spike, his mana, instead of bouncing back to him, disappeared.


    Lan hurried over and crushed the stone spike with his fist, obliterating it after half a minute. When he was finished, a black pit remained where the spike had once been. Lan couldn’t see what lay at the bottom of the hole, but the cold draft creeping out sent shivers crawling up his spine.


    He checked behind him, but it seemed the two girls had similar thoughts to him. They would rather collect all the crown pieces first and then fight for them at the end. ‘I don’t want to get ambushed when I come back out, though…’ Lan stared into the dark hole, suspecting he would be returning after a hard-fought battle. If someone was waiting for him when he clambered back out…


    Lan searched for something to cover the hole, but the pit was bare besides the stone spikes. ‘Hm… Would that work?’


    Before entering the pit, Lan tried to break a separate spike off at its base and use it to plug the hole. After some fiddling, he managed to rip one out of the ground and moved it beside the pit. As he jumped in, he used mana ropes to drag the spike into place, hoping that nobody would notice he was in this particular pit until he wanted them to.


    He dropped the pit for what felt like forever, endlessly plunging down into the darkness. The deeper he descended, the colder it got, and after falling for five minutes, he could safely say it was colder than the glacial land he had fought the Eel in. Far colder.


    While falling, Lan fumbled with his lantern, lighting it after some difficulty. The lonely flame did its best to light the desolate chute walls that had never seen anything but darkness. Thick sheets of ice coated the walls, and as Lan fell deeper, the ice got thicker.


    Eventually, his shoulders were chafing on the sides of the chute as it narrowed, and he began to panic. If he got stuck here… what then? Would he be forced to kill himself to get out?


    Perhaps his prayers were heard because the chute suddenly opened up into a vast cavern filled with icy-blue water so clear it looked like glass.


    “Shit!” Lan cursed, there was nowhere to land, and he didn’t want to get his lantern wet. Just before landing in the water, he threw the lantern above his head. The second he crashed into the icy pool, his whole body shuddered involuntarily, but he ignored it and swam back to the surface as quickly as possible. He got there just in time to catch the lantern and sighed when he saw that the flame remained lit. To be trapped underwater in the darkness was surely a death sentence.


    Before he did anything else, Lan formed a spear from ice and jammed it into the cavern wall, hanging the lantern from the icy pole.


    After that, he formed four water ropes and used them to scale the wall. He knew that hypothermia was a real possibility if he spent too long in the water. This should have been impossible, considering his insane endurance and vitality, but the water in the cavern was cold to the point of impossibility. Lan had no idea how it hadn’t frozen yet.


    He looked down into the endless pool, seeing nothing but dark green seaweed. There were countless tentacles of the stuff, waving slightly in the underwater current. It was as though a forest had grown underwater, and no matter how hard Lan tried, he couldn’t penetrate the dense wall of green.


    Squinting, Lan peered through the tangled net of seaweed. The water was so clear and crystalline that he would have been able to see all the way to the bottom of the pool if not for the foliage. At the base of the overwhelming mountain of seaweed, Lan glimpsed something blue. It shimmered in the flickering lantern light hundreds of metres below the surface.


    Lan looked closer, trying to figure out what the shining blue thing was. It was difficult to tell from outside the pool, but he was pretty sure he was looking at a flawless blue pearl.


    ‘Could that be part of the crown?’ Lan wondered. It certainly did look opulent, ‘But knowing the Bridge, it would never make something like that easy to get.’


    He sighed and prepared to dive into the pool. Fighting off both hypothermia and a monster was tricky but doable.