The room was filled with keys.
Thousands of keys. We had to step onto a pile of keys just to get inside. It felt something like a legendary dragon’s hoard, only the dragon was either very misguided or extremely eccentric.
Or maybe it just wanted to start a new, key-centric economy. Who knew?
I knelt down once I’d gotten in there, examining the sheer variety of keys. No two keys looked exactly alike. Some had handle styles that resembled animals, some were painted unnatural colors. Most, but not all of them, looked like they were built for modern pin tumbler locks. A few of them didn’t have the necessary cuts toward the tip, though.
One of them was just a flat rectangular piece of wood. It took me a minute to realize it was a piano key.
Apparently, the goddess had a sense of humor.
The room itself was square shaped, and our entry door was on the center of one of the faces. The left and right faces also had doors. Each of which had an abundantly obvious series of three locks on the surface.
Vera walked to the conspicuously empty wall face directly across from us and put a hand against the stone. “Not hollow. Seems like a real wall. I’ll see if I can figure out anything about the locks. I don’t detect any other traps, so you can probably look around somewhat safely.”
Jin and Professor Orden headed to the left door, so I followed Sera toward the right one. The three locks on the surface were blue, yellow, and red. It reminded me of my Judgment.
Vera walked up next to me, and then touched the face of one of the locks. “Hrm. Built for a specific key; it’ll trigger a trap in the ceiling of the room if we use the wrong one.”
She repeated the process with the other two locks. I was curious what it was like using her attunement. Did information just appear in her head, like she’d always known it, or was there a visual component? It didn’t seem like the right time to ask, though.
“These require other keys. Seems pretty straightforward, but I’ll check the other door as well.”
I frowned. “So, we’re just supposed to dig through a pile of keys until we find the matching ones? That seems...uninteresting, compared to some of the other challenges.”
Vera shrugged. “Not every challenge you face in life is going to be about combat skills or lightning fast reflexes. This one is probably a test of patience, or maybe problem solving. There’s probably a way to speed this up. There usually is. Maybe several.”
Sera picked up a key from the pile and offered it to Vera. “If we hand you a key, will you be able to tell if it’s the right one before we try it in a lock?”
Vera accepted the key. “Probably. Interesting. This key isn’t enchanted. The lock was definitely looking for an enchantment. That’s how it checks if the key is right.”
I considered that. “That narrows things a lot, actually. I could probably find the enchanted keys pretty fast. Or, at least, the ones that aren’t buried.”
I tapped my mana watch to my forehead and checked the value. 48/48. I’d used a little bit of the mana from my hand during the fight, but none of my mental mana. It would be safe to turn my attunement on for just a bit.
I looked back to Vera. “I’m going to activate my attunement and start picking up keys. I’ll hand them to you when I find them.”
“Sounds like a good plan.” Vera nodded and started walking to the other side of the room.
I turned my attunement on. It was momentarily blinding; there was magic everywhere in the tower. Literally everywhere; even the air itself was infused with a little bit of mana.
I wasn’t just seeing the mana. The mana was so thick around me that I could feel it. It was like a haze of mist all around me, solid enough that I could imagine touching it.
Could I?
Experimentally, I reached out with my right hand and focused my mind. I tried to reach into the ambient mana and pull on it like I could with a mana crystal. A tiny patch of mana reacted, swirling around my fingers. The mana pulled away from my hand a moment later, indicating that something was working against my efforts.
Interesting. I’ll have to experiment with this more later.
The brightest source of mana in the room was Derek; he had his Emerald shroud active. It made sense. We all knew he was an Emerald, so he had no reason to hide it and risk suffering an injury with a weaker shroud.
After that, the strongest auras were from Derek’s weapons and Orden’s tunic. The ring of regeneration was next, glowing with a golden Citrine aura.
Interestingly enough, Selys-Lyann didn’t have a colored glow at all. The aura around it was translucent, much like a quartz attuned. I doubted it was only Quartz-Level, however, which implied that one of the runes on the weapon was designed to conceal the sword’s aura.
Once I’d gotten used to the glow, I started picking through the keys until I found glowing ones. I found a good dozen of them among the hundreds on the surface of the pile. Apparently this wouldn’t be as simple as just finding the six magic keys among all of them.
Still, this was vastly more efficient than having Vera check all of the keys.
After she’d finished checking the locks on other side of the room and confirmed that they worked the same way, I started picking up the magic keys. Professor Orden beat me to some of them.
I was a little surprised she decided to help, but I wasn’t going to complain.
Between the two of us, we picked up the visible keys and handed them off to Vera within a couple minutes. After that, we began the exhausting process of digging through the vast piles of other keys for more enchanted ones.
At one point, I found a wooden slat that had the word “key” written on it.
Yeah, Selys definitely had a sense of humor. Not a very sophisticated one, but it was there.
I shook my head and kept digging.