The moment I step into the room from the hallway, I'm immediately swallowed by an eerie silence. The space before me stretches endlessly, shrouded in a dense fog that blurs everything beyond my sight. The walls and ceiling are indistinct, lost in the mist. The floor beneath my feet feels uneven, covered with thick moss, dead leaves, and loose earth. Every step is soft but dangerous, the terrain treacherous as it swallows every sound I make, leaving only a heavy stillness behind.
This roo a vast, dimly lit forest doesn't look like any forest I've seen before. The trees are colossal, their gnarled branches twisting up into a sky that's completely obscured. The faint light filtering through the dense canopy barely touches the twisted trunks. The bark is covered in dark vines, creeping and shifting, as though they're responding to some unseen force. The air is stifling humid, oppressive, and thick with the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves, occasionally cut through by a sharp, distant tang of something burning.
The atmosphere is heavy as if the very room is aware of my presence. There's no wind, but every so often, I feel a subtle shift in temperature or a faint breeze, moving through the trees with whispers barely audible to my ears.
Suddenly, the loudspeaker crackles to life, Lippo's voice cutting through the silence once more. "This is your second trial, the Hidden. By the way, we've hired some of the prisoners as examiners, and for every hour you spend here, one year is taken off their sentences. Your goal is to avoid getting hit and catch the predator. Oh, and if you die their sentences get all the hours you have left as years off. So if you were to die right now they would get 69 years off"
I immediately envelop the entire room in my En. The walls are hiding silencing mechanisms, and there's an extra wall in front of the real one that is all mirrors. It makes a simple optical illusion making the room look far bigger than it is by using the mirrors to "duplicate the trees" on all sides. Between these walls are passageways, and within them, there are 15 prisoners, each armed with either a bow or a spear. Too bad for them they're out of their depth as I know Nen, and this test is no challenge at all for just about any Nen user.
I cover myself in shadows, using the forest around me as cover. With trees scattered everywhere, I slip into the passageways without a sound. They won't see me coming unless they can sense Nen But if any of them could I might as well be a 164-foot lizard in the middle of Japan for all the subtlety I'd be able to manage without any concealing hatsu.
The passageway is simply a door in the ground next to one of the mirrored walls. The truth is, the room is only 164 feet by 164 feet about 50 meters by 50 meters much smaller than the last one, which had a radius of 820 feet, or 250 meters. The area there was 2.1 million square feet or 643,128 meters, a massive space for my En to cover. Even at full range, I could only extend it halfway across.
I take a spear from the first prisoner I kill and use it to deal with the rest. They were confused about where I disappeared to, and their panic made enough noise that, even without En, I would have found them with ease.
Once they're all dealt with, the floor in the center of the room begins to sink, a circular staircase-like structure lowering. Below is a vast, seemingly endless expanse a room designed to isolate me. The air here is thick with stale, unmoving pressure, and the floor is covered in gray ash, which absorbs sound, leaving me in perfect silence.
There are no windows, no doors, no way out. The walls are smooth, stretching up into a thick haze that seems to defy the laws of nature. This room could go on forever, and even with my En reaching its full extent, I can't sense a corner. The ceiling is cloaked in swirling fog, and I can't tell where the room ends. The emptiness feels both infinite and claustrophobic, as though I'm trapped in a void, unsure if it's as vast as a galaxy or as small as a box. It's obviously the former though.
Once again, Lippo's voice crackles over the speaker. "This room is called The Void of Resilience. It's a sensory deprivation chamber meant to test your endurance. You'll be left here and can say 'stop' anytime between 1 and 5 hours. Afterward, you need to guess how long you've been here, rounding to the nearest 5 minutes. If you say stop before 1 hour or after 5, you fail. If you guess the time exactly, you fail. Good luck."
I grin to myself another easy test. I've had a timer on my wrist the entire time, hidden beneath my clothing, so this won't be much of a challenge. I check the time its 68 hours 47 minutes. I get comfortable, sitting down and waiting for the timer to hit 67 hours 47 minutes. But just as I do, a spear comes flying out of nowhere, fast and aimed directly at me. Then another. And another. A total of four spears come at me, spaced just far enough apart to cover every possible dodge.
I activate my En and sense them coming before I even see them. I grab one spear out of the air, using it to deflect the other two behind me. For the next 60 minutes, spears continue to fly toward me.
As the timer goes off, I shout, "Stop!"
I glance down at the broken spears scattered across the ground. "It's been 1 hour and 1 minute since I got into this room and a full hour since you finished explaining."
I almost hear Lippo's confusion through the speaker, probably baffled by how I knew the exact time without a watch. I'm sure he didn't know about the one I had hidden under my sleeve, and the alarm was quiet enough that the speakers didn't pick it up. But just as I think he might be distracted by another contestant, the room suddenly turns white.
The blinding light washes over me, and a black door in the corner opens, revealing a steep metal slide. I jump onto it, feeling a rush of wind as I slide down into the next room just as vast and confusing as the last.
Once again, Lippo's voice crackles over the speaker. "This is the Room of Cognitive Trials. It's designed to mirror the complexity and challenges of an entire human life. This place will test your mind pushing the limits of perception, memory, and reasoning. To pass and reach the final stage, you must solve all the puzzles and escape."