[CH598+ Continued] Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster's Power

Cut off from the outside, alone in a black void of darkness with no way to feel my body or know when time will pass, all I can do is wait.

The round's name was Isolation, so my best guess is that I must endure and not crack under the pressure of endless time without stimulation.

On its surface, this seems like a quite simple and straightforward first round for the trial.

All I have to do is sit and wait, but the daunting underside of this is that there is no timer signifying how long exactly I have to wait.

The worry that the outside world is moving on without me doesn't seem like an issue, as the tower's rules stated the third and final trial won't start until all challengers are present; and I trust my Inner Circle to stand their ground outside.

If Ember is in a similar situation as me, I trust that he will be just fine as well. As he's most likely lived more lifetimes than I can comprehend, waiting in an endless void may not be very difficult for his psyche.

I've been through something like this before, inside the Titan's Domain the first time I fell inside by accident, not knowing when I'd ever make it out of that solid white box.

Even returning to train, the isolation definitely changed me, but it was possible...

However, as these thoughts race through my consciousness, the fact that the difficulty of this trial was calculated beforehand just like the first one does give me a tinge of unease. My definition of long isolation may be far different from my battle partner's.

Even so, I can't move, speak, smell, or see; all I can do is endure. So that's what I do...

—

What I can only believe to be the first few hours go by extremely slowly, as this is the time when the reality of this situation truly sinks in.

I want to move around or hear some noise; it's like a gut impulse that craves patterns and wants there to be some kind of movement within the infinite darkness that hits my senses.

I try to count in my head, but after reaching 100,000, even this begins to seem trivial.

Then again, the moment I stop and decide to just sit in my own silence again, my mind forces me to restart the count.

I can think about potential scenarios in the outside world, like a fantasy playing in my mind, but they all fall short of the reality before me. This is not my normal mind; I cannot just picture crystal-clear images as if they were reality. All I can do is savor the fading memory of what it used to look like to see.

It's not like I'm closing my eyes to see this darkness; I don't have any eyes to close. This abyss of nothingness is everything I have.

Colors and sounds become nothing but a fading memory as I recalibrate to what's before me.

I don't feel hunger, pain, or pleasure whatsoever. My count reaches 100,000 again, and it doesn't feel like I'm counting fast or slow at all.

Both concepts begin to split away.

Maybe in the first few hours, I could have guessed that I'd say one or two numbers in my head every second, but now I can't tell if seconds, minutes, or even hours are going by between each number.

I begin to have mental slips in between each number I count, spacing off into the endless void, not remembering whether or not I was imagining what it was like in the outside world or still counting, and having to reset my numbers again and again.

From this point forward, I never make it back anywhere close to 100,000 again.

I consciously realize this, but there is nothing else to keep my mind occupied. I can only think about using my system, or the faces of my teammates, or the impending battles in this tower for so long.