Reinhart stepped ahead and pushed against the double door. Just like before, though, the gate seemed too heavy for one person alone to open, so Narcha helped him. When the slightest crack was open, the familiar flashes of light started to hit their eyes. Once the gate was fully open, they saw it.

They were back outside.

Reinhart smiled. “Well, ain’t that a surprise?”

The group filed out of the room, examining their surroundings. The grounds were still cracked, and there were dozens of tornadoes travelling in the distance, which meant they were still in the same region. When they looked back at the room they had just exited from, though, they noticed that the temple had disappeared, and instead a small squared shape building was in its place. They had left through an entirely different building than the one they had entered.

Narcha frowned. “So we got teleported?”

“Makes no difference. We’re still in the middle of an endless desert.” Reinhart looked up. “At least those birds aren’t around anymore.”

The woman didn’t seem too happy about it, though. “It feels like we’re being led around rather than exploring on our own.”

The knight shrugged. “Doesn’t matter too me as long as we’re getting rewards… Wait, that’s right!” his expression changed.

“What is it?!” Narcha looked at the man in alarm.

“We forgot to check the crypt drawers! What if there was something valuable in them?!”

The woman glared at him. “Didn’t you see what happened to that ghost?! If we went grave robbing and disturbed their corpses, I bet we would have ended up like him!”

Reinhart sighed. “Who knows? If that guy is really a demonic cultivator, maybe he would have respected us even more if we did it.”

Narcha ignored the man and turned to look at the horizon.

“There, that mountain is still there!” she pointed at it.

Red squinted his eyes. “It seems a bit closer.”

Indeed, they had travelled for quite a bit back then and had yet to make any noticeable progress towards the peak in the distance. Yet now, after being teleported, they seemed closer than before.

“Did we get teleported closer because we passed that test?” Narcha asked.

“This trial may be similar to the labyrinth one.” Eiwin nodded. “We may only be capable of making progress by passing through the challenges the trials throw at us.”

Narcha frowned. “But isn’t that ridiculous? If we didn’t have that compass, we would never have found that temple. It’s not fair!”

The younger woman seemed to be in thought. “It seems strange, yes. Stumbling upon these invisible buildings in this enormous desert would be a matter of pure luck. However, when you think about it, that compass is not an item the trial gave us, but something we found on those imperials.”

“The imperials seem to know what these trials were going to be about and came prepared.” Red said. “Anything else would be too much of a coincidence.”

“And how would they know that?” Narcha seemed skeptical. “This is a cultivator’s inheritance ground! If people know the challenges before passing through them, there’s no point in making a trial at all!”

The boy didn’t respond. He recalled what a bandit from earlier told him, about how the imperials claimed this was a tomb of one of their ancestors. Reinhart had dismissed it earlier as nothing more than an absurd idea, yet it didn’t seem as far-fetched considering what was happening.

Red looked over at the knight. Reinhart, however, just smiled back at him.

“Is the compass working again?” the man asked. “If it’s really this important, we will need it.”

The boy shook his head.

Reinhart sighed. “I guess we have no choice but to keep walking, then. Watch out for the birds and giant insects burrowing underground this time around!”

No one had any other suggestions, and the group started to walk towards the mountain on the horizon again.

…

“Why is this place so fucking empty?!”

Narcha’s angered words echoed through the desert.

They had been walking for almost an hour already, and they had yet to find anything notable. Not to mention, the mountain didn’t seem any closer, either. By now, they were certain that they were under some kind of illusion or spatial distortion. Either that, or the mountain was so large and so distant that it would take them an unimaginable amount of time to reach it.

In either case, now they had definite proof that just walking towards it wouldn’t get them anywhere, at least not any time soon. Unfortunately for them, Red’s compass had yet to show any changes, so they didn’t have any other leads.

“We are missing something.” Reinhart said with a thoughtful expression.

“You think?!” Narcha glared at him.

The knight threw his hands up. “Hey, I’m just trying to start a discussion, okay?! If we know we are missing something, let’s think about it… What exactly are we missing?”

Narcha frowned. “Maybe we should stop heading towards the mountain and walk in other directions. Perhaps that is exactly what this trial wants of us, and the only way to proceed.”

Reinhart seemed skeptical. “That doesn’t seem right. What’s the lesson in that? To stop heading towards the one obvious goal and look for invisible things in random directions?”

“Who says there needs to be a lesson in this?! Not everything is about some obscure reason!”

“Please, Miss Valt.” Eiwin tried to calm her companion down. “Mister Reinhart has a point. I doubt the solution to this is that easy.”

Narcha gritted her teeth. “What else are we supposed to do, though?! We know walking towards it doesn’t work, so the only other option is to walk away from it!”

Reinhart smiled. “You have a point. But first…” he looked over at Red. “Have you managed to make it work?”

“Not yet.” the boy shook his head.

Red hadn’t been idling around during this last hour. He had been examining the compass, hoping to find some hidden mechanism, to no avail. The boy assumed that this item might need spirit stones to work, and this might have been one of the reasons why the imperials had almost no spirit stones - they had been using them to power the compass.

However, upon touching the item with a spirit stone, no sudden reaction happened. Red tried it many ways, but no matter what part of the compass he touched, nothing seemed to happen. If the item could absorb the Spiritual Energy from the stones, it wasn’t just by touching it.

When he thought about it further, it made sense that this method wouldn’t work. After all, wouldn’t it be very inconvenient if your magical item just so happened to absorb the Spiritual Energy of anything it came in contact with? What if it made all your other magical belongings useless in the process? It would be a terrible flaw in design.

Unfortunately for Red, though, this meant he wasn’t able to get the compass working.

The news didn’t seem to surprise Reinhart, but he still seemed disappointed. “I was hoping you’d be able to work a miracle, kid.”

Red frowned. “I know nothing about magical items.”

The knight nodded. “Maybe you should learn about it when you return - could be useful. In the meantime, do you have any other brilliant ideas about how we should proceed?”

“If what Eiwin said earlier is true, and we need to find these invisible buildings to proceed, then there must be a way to find them other than just hoping to stumble on one. I doubt the creator of this place would design it in such a way that you would need to rely on an external item to succeed.”

“Then what do you suggest, kid?” Narcha asked. “There’s nothing around us! Nothing but dust and those damn tornadoes!”

She waved her hand around her to punctuate her words.

Her complaint, however, gave Red some pause. Suddenly, an idea came to him.

“The tornadoes.” he said. “They’re the answer.”

Narcha seemed confused. “What do you mean by that?”

“It’s the only thing we haven’t explored.” Red said. “If we want to proceed, we must face them head-on.”

Eiwin and Reinhart’s expression changed in realization after hearing his words.

Narcha, however, looked at the boy as if he was insane. “Are you out of your mind? Those things will rip us apart! We’ll die!”

“… When you entered this place, did you see a sentence written on a wall?” Red responded with a question of his own.

She nodded. “... There was something like that.”

“Do you remember what it said?”

“If I remember it?” Narcha fell silent in deep thought. A few seconds later, though, her expression also changed in realization. “You mean?!…”

Red nodded. “Only he who knows death as a friend may go further.”

The woman seemed hesitant. “Isn’t that too much, though? I mean, how do we know this is what he meant by that sentence?”

“We’ll never know for sure, but if you consider the labyrinth trial, it makes sense.” the boy said. “Me and the others tried to avoid the rooms with the monsters back then and focus on finding our way out. However, we ended up getting lost, and only after we decided to fight against the monsters did the true path reveal itself. Then, there’s also the giant snake, which we had to pass through without faltering.”

These words seemed to further convince Narcha.

Still, the woman looked troubled. “… This is too dangerous.”

Reinhart laughed. “You just sneaked past that giant snake! What could be more dangerous than that?!”

“That’s because back then we knew that was what we needed to do!” Narcha glared at him. “Right now we are taking a shot in the dark! If we are wrong about this, we’ll definitely die!”

“How about this, then?” the knight pointed at himself. “I’ll go first since you’re too scared.”

“Who said I’m scared, you bastard!” she gritted her teeth.

Reinhart smiled. “If that’s the case, do you want to go first?”

Narcha seemed to be seriously considering the suggestion.

However, Red interjected. “You should go first, Reinhart. Since you still have your defensive talismans, you can survive the tornado if something goes wrong.”

Narcha glared at the man in surprise. “You still have more defensive talismans?!”

Reinhart didn’t respond to her, instead looking at Red, his smile twitching. “… You’re right, kid. I should go first, just in case.”

The boy nodded. “Since we have that settled, we should get going.”

Red looked around them, spotting the closest tornado, well over a kilometer away. The spinning funnel of dust and wind extended high above, merging into the clouds.

A monument to the destructive power of nature.

They were about to head right towards it.

“We’re going to that one.” Red said.