CHAPTER 343: OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK

Victor hovered, squinting into the darkness.

’Is this it?’

He’d been underwater for nearly fifteen minutes, but he wasn’t worried.

With his cultivation and training from back then in the academy, he could easily hold his breath for over an hour. Still, he didn’t like wasting time.

The flickering light appeared again this time to his right, near the western end of the lakebed.

Victor instantly shifted toward it... then stopped.

Because something wasn’t right.

Though he was standing on solid ice, which meant he had reached the bottom, the flicker of light came from deeper... beneath this floor.

"Huh?"

He scanned the ground until he found a slim crack, barely wide enough for a hand to slip through.

This was where the faint moon-colored light glow had come from.

If not for the flash earlier, he wouldn’t have noticed at all that there was extra room for descent below this surface.

He crouched, pressing his palm to the ice and sliding his fingers further and further to the side in order to confirm the position of the crack.

He needed to expand the space...

Thankfully, he had memorized the crack’s position during the last flicker so he proceeded to raise his fist and send it hurling downward.

BOOM!

The ice floor splintered loudly, followed by a muffled but resonant sound.

A cascade of shards crumbled inward, widening the crack until an opening formed large enough for him to pass through.

A downward current sucked at the edges.

Victor gulped while staring downwards into the darkness.

"Here we go again. If I die, I swear I’m haunting this lake."

He slipped inside.

The passage was ridiculously narrow. Squeezing-through-a-letterbox narrow. Victor twisted his body sideways, inching down through the descending passage while spiky ice brushed his shoulders and legs. Several times he thought the tight space would trap him entirely.

’Why... do I always end up in weird places?’ he groaned internally. ’Why can’t I just find treasures in peaceful meadows like normal people?’

Step by step downward, the space grew tighter.

Until his foot hit a new surface.

This time, he had arrived at the real bottom of the unfrozen lake.

And the moment he arrived, he saw it.

A blueish glow pulsed faintly from the left side of the space, illuminating a small, eerie chamber of frost and stone.

Embedded halfway into the icy bottom of the lake, was...

A gem.

Or something gem-like.

It was oval-shaped, smooth, with a crystalline structure that gave off rhythmic pulses of soft lunar light like a very slowly dying heartbeat.

Victor paused in place briefly.

’...That’s definitely not normal.’

He approached slowly and cautiously, ignoring the water pressure resting on his shoulders. The energy radiating from that thing wasn’t aggressive but it felt very strange.

Like the moon had left a memory frozen inside a crystal.

He knelt beside it.

His fingers brushed its surface.

An explosion of warmth spread through his arm, completely contradictory to the icy environment around it.

Victor felt his own heartbeat resonate faintly, responding to the gem’s rhythm.

"What are you?" he whispered.

Just when he curled his fingers around its edge to pull it free—

CRRRRRAAAACK!!!

The lake wall to his right trembled violently.

Pieces of ice broke off and then a massive portion of the wall gave way entirely.

Victor’s eyes widened.

"Oh, come on—"

KRRSHSHHHHH!!!

Thousands of pounds of ice crashed down on him like a collapsing mountain.

He should have been pinned briefly by the weight but completely unaffected due to his current strength...

However, when these massive pieces of ice collapsed onto him, his body phased through the floor.

The weight that should have pushed him down onto the surface, somehow pushed him through it.

It was like slipping through a ghostly veil.

There was no pain.

No resistance.

No thought.

One second he was underwater, crushed against the icy ground.

The next—

FWUMP!

He fell through the floor like it wasn’t even there and landed hard on solid ground.

Not submerged.

Not wet.

Actual ground.

"—GUH!"

Victor rolled twice before stopping face-down.

He lay there silently.

Then lifted his head, spitting out water.

"What the hell?"

He pushed himself up, dusting ice particles off his body.

His body was completely dry with no water clinging to him. It was like passing through that icy floor had stripped the lake’s presence from him entirely.

He stood and stared upward.

The ceiling where he had fallen through looked like a vast expanse of darkness stretching overhead like a starless night sky.

Originally Victor would have pushed himself back up when the Ice rocks fell onto of him and even destroyed them but he didn’t get the chance to.

It was like the floor of the lake transformed from solid matter to something else at that particular moment.

"...Where the hell am I?"

He was standing on a dimly illuminated stone surface.

He looked around and he seemed to be in an enormous underground chamber that stretched out as far as the eyes could see.

It even seemed more enormous than the entire lake above.

Frost coated the walls in intricate patterns resembling ancient rune-lines.

Victor blinked twice, then a third time for good measure.

Cold air brushed across his cheeks as he slowly turned in place, taking in the sight before him.

The floor stretched onward like a frozen desert of smooth white stone.

"Great... I always wanted to fall into the refrigerator section of a prehistoric library," Victor voice echoed softly into the endless chamber as he spoke.

"Gotta get back up there," he narrowed his eyes, sucked in a deep breath, then bent his knees and shot upward in a powerful jump.

Thwwooomm~

He soared back toward the ceiling where he’d come from while clenching his fingers together tighly.

In the next instant, his fist struck the surface with a sharp boom. The moment he hit it, the world blinked, and he found himself back on the ground.

"...Huh?"

He tried again, leaping straight towards the lake bottom he’d phased in from.

Boom!

BAM!

Bang

No matter how much he tried, it resulted in the same thing.

For reasons unknown, he couldn’t phase back through it and no matter how much he attacked or whatever technique he used, the surface had refused to give in.

It was like the lake surface was being protected by some powerful force... more powerful than his current strength.

On the seventh attempt he simply pressed his palm against the barrier, sighed deeply and whispered:

"I’m starting to think you don’t want me to leave."

He jumped once more with a Gale Strike-infused punch but still nothing.

He even tried Skyfire Spiral at one point just to see if the whirling fire would melt whatever invisible obstacle was blocking him. Instead, the flames vanished like someone had blown out a candle.

After countless tries, he stood there with hands on his hips.

"Alright. Fine. You win. You’re impenetrable. Congratulations. I’ll send you a medal in the mail."

At the very least, he was glad there was no water down here. Had this chamber been submerged, Victor would’ve drowned eventually. He could only hold his breath for about an hour, after all.

He turned around and finally began walking. He needed to find another way to get to the top.

However, the deeper he traversed this chamber, the stranger it became.

The massive ice walls were lined with carvings of creatures he had never seen before. Entire murals of battles, rituals, and structures shaped like rough ice spires. Odd, spiraling statues stood at intervals. They were too symmetrical to be random, too alien to be human.

The whole place looked like a temple built by someone who had never seen a temple before but heard about them once from a drunk uncle.

As he walked, a faint whirring hovered in the air.

It was subtle but extremely irritating.

Victor angled his head and walked in the opposite direction. The whirring followed.

He stopped. The whirring stopped.

He sped up. It sped up.

Victor glared upward like he expected the ceiling to apologize.

"Listen—I know I’m handsome, but that doesn’t mean you need to breathe down my neck."

He decided to ignore it and pressed on. The pillars he passed were massive and carved from ice with identical swirling patterns.

Somehow, they didn’t seem like pillars naturally constructed due to the nature of the terrain.

They seemed artificially crafted but Victor could only speculate for now.

The deeper he went, the more he felt like he’d been walking in circles.

To put an end to his suspicion, he scratched a small mark across one of the pillars, leaving a thin line of white frost.

Afterwards, he kept walking.

Fifteen minutes later, he spotted the same mark again, confirming his suspicion.

His cheeks puffed out.

"The oldest trick in the book," he groaned while dragging a hand down his face. "Are you seriously trying to trap a Void Emperor in a space loop?"