Sofia yanked on the metal chains; they broke under her strength. With the stat candy, my body is starting to be crazy, even without the demon form. How long until I can do the same things with and without it?

“Status seems alright. Very little light in here, but that’s no problem anymore.” I’ll assess the situation first and switch Pareth’s body if needed.

She could sense the nearby layout with her mana senses. It looked like some kind of prison with more cells along hers. All empty.

[Graveyard of the righteous]

The level 199 graveyard now extended to three hundred meters in all directions, allowing her to map things out a bit more without moving. The prison corridor extended on either side, and that was it. No empty space either up or down; this place is thoroughly buried, so there is no real choice but to follow the corridor.

Let me try, though.

Sofia took out her mithril dagger and started carving out the back wall of her cell. She couldn’t go far. There was a single layer of stone bricks before the mithril dagger bumped against a layer of dark gray stone speckled with shiny white dots. The mithril dagger couldn’t leave so much as a scratch on it. It was the dagger’s coating that got scratched.

“Well, shit. Can I [Identify] this? I’d need to get a separate chunk of it somehow for that to work…” Either way, I get the message, no digging. Can the graveyard boys get me through it?

Sofia tried, and they could get her through the sturdy material, but there wasn’t anywhere on the other side to drop her off. She returned to the prison, entering the next cell by the wall.

Empty. And this one doesn’t even have a door. I don’t want to bother changing Pareth’s body right now… I’ll put on my armor and summon the rats to explore for me.

After tearing out a page from the book and watching her army of a hundred skeleton rats scurry away through the corridor, she put on the Orichalcum armor, then activated the bone armor over it. In her left hand, she held a bone kite shield blessed with [Bone dominus], and in her right hand, the Avian staff. It is still not primed, but I do like the new function.

Thanks to Zerei’s tinkering, if she dropped the staff, it would now hover in place instead of falling to the ground. She could also recall it to her hand with a thought. It would be even better if it teleported back to my hand instead of flying back, but that’s still good.

The back of her mind was keeping track of the rat swarm’s progress. They spread to every path and room they could find, giving Sofia an idea of the place’s layout. It’s a maze. Huge maze. No enemies still. The rats had two orders to convey their findings, jumping in place meant enemy or hazard, and running in circles meant ‘interactable objects’.

Two objects to the right. Let’s check it out.

Sofia followed the general direction to the rats running in circles; it wasn’t too hard. Despite being a maze of sorts, every corridor was long and straight. The turns and intersections were all quite a ways apart. Let’s see what we have here… After a last turn, Sofia saw the rat circling a cloth pouch on the ground.

Sofia checked the surroundings but couldn’t detect any kind of trap. She had the rat bring her the pouch. Undoing the cord that held it closed revealed a glass flask with about a liter of water and a piece of dry bread.

Looks like they’re serious about the one-year deadline. We even get provisions in case we don't have them… I don’t need it, but I’ll take it. New order: rats, bring back any cloth pouch you find. Since the other rat didn’t stop running in circles, she kept walking further to check on him too.

These corridors all look like each other.

What the second rat found was a large wooden chest.

This looks comically out of place. Is it a trap? Just a chest against a wall in the middle of a long corridor? Go on, open it.

The level 199 rat had more than enough strength to open the chest and climb inside. No longer holding the lid, it closed on him, but nothing special happened.

Not trapped.

The rat climbed out a few seconds later, holding a tiny scroll in its jaw.

Sofia took and unfurled the scroll. ‘E 3’ … E3? I’ll keep that in mind for later… So far, this is looking quite simple. Sofia turned around, and as if to spite what she had just thought, she realized that the path she had come from no longer existed.

It’s been walled off?

Sending the graveyard skeletons yielded no results, 300 meters, all wall. There was no teleportation. My position relative to the rats on the other side hasn’t changed, so the wall moved. And silently enough that I didn’t even notice it. That’s going to make mapping this place a lot harder.

Sofia could only go forward. With no better option, she took out a notebook to trace the path she had taken until now, cross-hatching over the newly walled-off section.

A rat a bit further ahead started jumping in place. Let’s get moving.

The rat died before Sofia could reach it, but she followed the trail anyway, recalling a few of the other nearby rats to scout ahead of her. She could keep track of the enemy's position by sending a rat to die every so often. It was moving rather slowly.

Sofia reached a four-way intersection, but she didn’t enter it. On the path directly to her right, the enemy was about two-hundred meters away, going toward her. Way too far for her mana senses.

I’ll just take a quick peek.

Grabbing a small handheld mirror from her ring, she used it to spy on the thing without showing herself.

The reflection in the mirror revealed the presence of a heavy brown-scaled lizard taking up most of the space as it advanced. Shit.

That was a monster Sofia recognized from the books she had read. I’m not fighting that. She took off the layers of armor as fast as she could and ran off quietly. Thankfully there were other ways to go behind her. Getting caught between that thing and a dead end was a death sentence.

And the walls can move? I take back anything I said about this being simple. That’s a damned lesser stone dragon! What is it doing in the level 199 trial?!

Sofia did her best to recall all the information she had on the lesser stone dragons.

Despite the book calling them ‘dragons’, lesser stone dragons barely have anything in common with actual dragons. If one was unlucky enough to meet one of them during a cave exploration in the northern mountain range, they could only pray that it didn’t notice them.

Lesser stone dragons were vicious hunters who stopped at nothing to protect their territory. Under the command of their magic, the very walls of their caves would come alive to crush and destroy any invaders. Most often, adult lesser stone dragons were around two to three meters tall and large and anywhere between levels 300 and 400. They were an extremely sturdy species even for their level, making them the apex predators of the underground world.

The only good thing is that these are territorial. There won’t ever be two of them near each other. This is an adult and a big one. Maybe Pareth in his current form would have a chance if only he could fight in these narrow corridors…

Once she was far enough that she felt safe, Sofia stopped in her tracks.

What if I kill it, though?

Sen had explained that how high you climbed determined the rewards of the trial, yes. But he had never said other actions wouldn’t count. And I got my specialization from killing Orvod, a grossly over-leveled opponent.

How do I do that, though? I’ll have one of the smaller rats track its movements from far away for now. Before figuring out how to kill this thing, I need to know more about what this place has to offer. Can’t be only lesser dragons, moving walls, cloth pouches, and wooden chests.

Sofia was holding her notebook as she followed random paths; she ran out of space for her map. I’m dumb. She took a bone wing from her storage and shaped it into a big sheet of flat bone. Cutting out a square of it, she inscribed ‘E3’ on it and drew out on it with the chest at the center. She could do that with a thought, it was faster and more precise than using a pen on a notebook, and she could also draw the map in much thinner lines, scaling it down until it was barely legible. That’s such a better map already. I need to actively think about incorporating [bone dominus] into everything I do. Makes so much stuff simpler.

Sofia stored her map and looked around.

Crap.

I was distracted. I’ve been walled off…