There were three possibilities in front of Ikky: the fire symbol, the eye symbol, and the man pushing the mountain. He walked past them to try to decide. When the boy passed the fire symbol, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. It was just a feeling, but guided by his sixth sense, he ruled it out, that was not the way to go. Which of the two paths would he choose? Neither of them gave him any special intuition so Ikky drew lots, heads to the eye and tails to the man pushing the stone. It came up tails, and without further ado he headed for the entrance to the tunnel.
The entrance would be a meter and a half wide, with walls of pure white marble and the floor paved with rectangular marble tiles.
The player walked in a straight line for ten minutes without any changes, a torch every 25 steps, one to the right, one to the left, nothing out of the ordinary. Thinking about the distance traveled and measuring it in steps, the tunnel must have been more than 1 kilometer, and there was no end in sight.
Another ten minutes passed without Ikky getting anywhere. In case his senses were deceiving him, the boy made a small cut on his finger, enough to leave a mark on the wall, he did not want to risk scratching the walls with a weapon in case some kind of trap was unleashed or the noise alerted some monster.
He advanced another twenty minutes without getting anywhere or finding his own marks, either they had been magically erased or the tunnel had no end. Frustrated and willing to discover if there was some trick, and after leaving the mark of a circle of blood on the wall, Ikky decided to retrace his steps and look for his signal.
On the way back he found his blood mark on the wall, it had not been erased, and it was the same distance in steps that he had counted. He continued walking and arrived back at the square after 40 minutes of walking. There was no trick, it was 40 minutes, the same as he had walked in the opposite direction.
Ikky began to piece together the puzzle: a huge corridor with torches on the right and left, every 25 steps exactly. The corridor seemed to have no end, but in a magical world the distances did not have to be realistic.
But if there was something there it had to be in the details, the only thing that broke the continuity of the tunnel was the presence of torches every few meters. If there was a hidden mechanism or some kind of test or device it had to be in the torches.
The player examined the first torch's incense burner; it could not be turned or pushed, and there did not seem to be any hidden mechanism. The only thing left for Ikky to try was to extinguish the torch. He repeated the operation every 25 meters, extinguishing all the fires behind him; This time it took him 40 minutes to reach the blood mark, and he took less and less time to extinguish the torches by hitting them on the ground. In this way he reached his last mark, a circle.
Ikky was not willing to give up, nor stop putting out torches, it was the rules of the cheating player to repeat ad nauseum, even with the craziest ideas, even if it seemed like a waste of time, even if it didn't make sense, but only in this way sometimes the miracle of unlocking hidden things was worked.
The nature of a pro gamer was combat, action, immediacy, it was not different from the basic instincts of any human being, however what differentiated a cheating player from them was precisely that, patience.
Only a person who had spent entire nights reading hexadecimal code tables looking for that chain of data that indicated a weakness, a certain piece of information to modify, could accept as valid the continuation without stopping.
To continue on such an absurd path despite the feeling of not getting anywhere, you had to have a very strong will not to give up, not to give up, not to fall into another more immediate, more pleasurable stimulus. Luckily Ikky wasn't that kind of person, on the contrary, doing that instead of attacking or defending himself from monsters that tried to kill him made him feel in his element. He couldn't help it but at that moment he had a smile on his face.
Ikky continued to advance for another hour in a straight line, extinguishing the same torches over and over again. Even he began to think that the effort was useless, that the corridor was eternal, and that there would never be a change in the monotony of the marble. When he began to despair, the moment arrived, the first change in the monotony occurred, he could not see the continuous light of the torches in front of him; three more torches lit and then total darkness.
He did not extinguish the last lit torch; in fact he picked up another five that were off and put them in his backpack, before entering blindly into the darkness he would test the waters.
Ikky took the torch from the censer on the right, the last lit one, and advanced through the tunnel. After 25 steps, he saw another censer on the left, but the torch was out. He advanced, illuminated by the torch, another 25 meters, but this time there were no more censers. He continued another 25 steps and there was still nothing; another 25 steps and no sign of more torches. Ikky turned and went back to the last extinguished torch in the corridor, and lit it with the help of the one he was holding in his hand.
He did not know exactly why, but the player decided to return the lit one to its original place and extinguish it. It was an absurd or illogical act but it was what his instinct called him to do.
He returned slowly, to what was now the only point of light in the corridor. His vision in the darkness allowed him to advance without problems.
The obvious decision was to extinguish that torch as well, but first, Ikky moved again 25 meters to check that there was no other censer. That was true, there was no sign of one on the wall; However, something, an instinct, told him that he had to keep moving forward to the limit of the luminosity that lay ahead of him...