The backpack felt sturdy, and I guessed it was made of some kind of leather from the feel. I suspected it was something I’d find useful to grab in my future lives. Carefully, I opened the top of it and gently poured the contents onto the bed, in case of anything easily breakable.

  Several objects rolled free onto the mattress. The first two things to catch my eye were what looked like a full, unopened bottle of water and three torches. There were several plastic bags of what looked like seeds, each bag full of a different colored type. I had no idea if they were actually seeds, as I didn’t think seeds were normally such bright colors, but with my memory the way it was, I couldn’t trust that not to be normal.

  As I riffled through them, I found one last thing. A torn piece of paper with some scrawled writing on it. I held it up to the light to try and read what it said. The writing was incredibly messy, and trying to focus on it seemed to hurt my eyes, but I was finally able to piece together the scribbled words.

  I don’t think I can continue anymore. I’ve come back to this safe room to spend my last days in some small comfort. I write these words for whoever comes after me in hopes that it provides at least the tiniest bit of help. I do not know what will happen to my body when I pass or even if these few possessions I’ve been able to find will remain after I die. In case they do, though, heed my warning. The riddle itself is the trap; engaging at all with him will result in you being attacked, and if you are as unlucky as I was, mortally wounded. Leave while you can, and try to find another path.

  There was a bit more at the bottom, but it was torn and smeared more than the rest. My best guess was the letter R followed by the letter O; beyond that, I could make out nothing.

  Despite the fact that this was the first writing I had seen so far at all, I suspected those new abilities would come in handy. Back to the letter, though, it seemed my situation, while still unique, was less unique than I thought. I was not the first person to be trapped in whatever this place was. But whoever had written this note seemed to expect to die shortly after finishing, and as their possessions are still here, I think they did.

  That left other questions, though. What happened to the other part of the torn note? Who had torn it? What had happened to their body? If those things were removed from the room, why not the backpack itself? Considering the nature of this place so far, I knew I couldn’t trust the note’s accuracy. It could just as easily be another trap designed to spring whenever I found whatever the riddle creature they referred to was.

  Would this backpack just return to this room after my next death, waiting for me to grab it again? Considering everything else so far had reset, I thought it would, but I couldn’t start taking chances with assumptions on how this place worked just yet. I put everything back into the bag except for the water bottle and a single torch.

  Examining the bottle closely, I decided it looked like water. Even still, I wasn’t willing to try it just yet. I’d do that much closer to the moment of my death. There was no sense in wasting some possible exploration time. I knew I couldn’t get much further on my ankle, but I should at least be able to get my way into the next room.

  I stood up, my ankle once again screaming at the idea of the weight being returned to it. Immediately, I missed the comfortable seat of the bed’s mattress, but that wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I didn’t have any food, and assuming I did have drinkable water, I didn’t have nearly enough to survive the time I’d need for my ankle to recover.

  After packing the pencils and paper from the writing desk along with the water bottle into the backpack, I slung it over my shoulders. The added weight was misery. I closed my eyes and tried to focus my thoughts elsewhere, swallowing hard as I did so. The door opened easy enough from this side, and several steps later, I was back at the bottom of the collapsed floor.

  While there might have been more rooms hidden down here, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to move the rubble needed for a proper search at the moment. Instead, I walked over to the wall nearest the door and did one of the few things I currently did best. I started punching it. Over and over again, I slammed my fist against the painful stone until I had made a series of handholds to pull myself up to the door with.

  I was a little disappointed I hadn’t gained any further increases to my punching ability, but I certainly couldn’t complain about those level increases. That should speed me along on my future lives and repeating some of this. It was odd how fast I had taken to the idea of planning across different lives, but as I had lived several now, I was really starting to expect it would continue.

  I knew that was a potentially dangerous thing to get used to, and I planned to do my best to stay alive each time, but I didn’t think planning for what seemed to be my new reality was necessarily a bad idea. I just wished I knew if it really was my new reality. A thought had occurred to me earlier as I read the note, and it was now finally forcing its way into the forefront of my mind.

  What if I had written that note in a previous life before I could remember each new one? That would explain the lack of body. But it wouldn’t explain the note still being there, would it? Every other change I’ve made so far seemed to reset when I died.

  This thought process led me to another idea. Before I continued on deeper into this place, I should test leaving myself a note. I pulled out one of the pieces of paper and a broken pencil, and wrote a single word on it: test, and left it back in the room with the writing desk. I then took a second piece of paper and wrote test two on it, leaving that in the backpack.

  That notification I had expected. I smiled with a feeling of accomplishing something. It may have been as simple as accurately predicting one of these basic notifications, but that, as basic as they may be, did mean I was learning. Learning and adapting would be the key to finding out why I was here and escaping this place.

  The smile didn’t last as the pain in my ankle was kind enough to drag me back to the here and now. I had a wall to climb, and while I was sure I’d gain the climbing ability once I pulled myself back up to the main level, I didn’t have it now. Instead, I had to contend with bruised and bloody knuckles and a worse-than-useless leg. The climb also meant I couldn’t bring a lit torch from the other room with me, and while I could likely put them both out and bring them, that would just leave me with no way to relight them.

  Putting that all aside, I reached my left hand out, grasped the hold I had made earlier, and started pulling myself up, arm over arm, as the rough stone sliced deeper into my already hurt palms. By the time I had reached the top and received my expected reward, both of my hands ached. I was glad it had been a short climb.

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  The second ability made sense, though I wondered just how many resistances I could unlock. Potentially, could I resist basically anything this world could throw at me as long as I experienced it at least once? It was another interesting thought, and one that I couldn’t let myself dwell on due to the implications of where that ended.

  Finally, in front of me stood the door I had been working toward for the last three lives. It was taller than I was, which I guessed was roughly six feet, but I wasn’t entirely sure. Strange that that was the first time my own height had occurred to me, and even stranger that I didn’t know it. I made a mental note to go over everything I could remember about myself during my next life when my body hurt less.

  The door itself looked to be made of wood, and it had a simple metal door handle. Without any real options to test it for traps or anything else, I ignored the growing paranoia and turned it. The metal of the handle was cold and painful on my battered flesh as the door swung open silently on unseen hinges to another darkened hallway.

  Unlike the room I had started in, it was not pitch black. Light from my current room revealed another door directly across from the one I had just opened. It looked to be an exact match. The hall ran down in two opposite directions, with the darkness growing the further from the opened door. Poking my head through the opening I thought I could make out a door at either end in the dim remaining light, but I couldn’t be sure.

  As the now all too familiar box flashed into my mind, I realized the darkness seemed to recede just the slightest. The details on the doors still escaped me, but I was now more sure than I had been moments ago that these were, in fact, two more doors. It seemed I now had a choice of which direction to pursue.

  While the door in front of me seemed the easiest choice, I instead made a decision I knew my body would rebel against. As battered as I already was, now was the time to test this hall for any future traps. I hobbled from one end to the other, like the previous room, it was less wide than I was tall, and about likely about the same height. It seemed this place was corridor after corridor.

  At each end, I felt my heart race as I expected some new deadly surprise to catch me, but no, there was nothing. It was possible I had found another, if much less comfortable than the last, safe room. And now, back at where I had entered from, I was again faced with the same choice of which door I wanted to go through.

  The answer was obvious once I really thought about it. Given I had no knowledge of what was behind any of the doors, and they all looked reasonably similar, the only metric I had to base the decision on then was proximity to where I started. Going forward, I would do my best to work closest to furthest, in terms of how I explored this place. At times when the next destinations seemed of equal distance, I would favor whichever one was the most left.

  The second part was entirely arbitrary, but still useful to help me keep track of where I had been. That was another good decision I felt I had made, and the slight feeling of relief coursing through my brain seemed to agree with me. I reached out and opened the door, waiting in front of me.

  More light flooded into the corridor, but that fact was mostly lost on me, as instead my focus was entirely on the giant eyes looking back at me. They quickly narrowed, and then before I could fully process what I was looking at, something else shot out from behind the creature, piercing me hard in the chest. The pain assaulted my entire body as my brain finally caught up with my eyes. Was that a giant scorpion?

  I only vaguely understood the notifications as my body forced out several coughs. Each one of them sent new waves of pain racking through me. A strong metallic taste accompanied my final cough as I felt the blood filling my mouth. It seemed like there was an acid burning its way through every part of my body. And just as I thought the pain would never end, I was greeted by one last horrific sight in this life.

  The scorpion pulled me back toward its mouth as one of its claws reached out and crushed my legs in its grip. It then opened its mouth wide, forcing my head into its pincers. I felt a cracking sensation for only a moment as the creature closed its mouth.

  I bolted awake and immediately screamed in the horror of what my last moments had just been. It turned out there were limits to how well I could handle these deaths, and I had managed to run hard into one. The fact that there were worse things than the spike traps was now ingrained in my mind that fact was not at all comforting.

  The notification was enough to at least snap me out of the mental death loop I had been stuck in. It did nothing to actually hide the horrible memory, but hopefully, in time, it too would fade. In an attempt to distract myself, I walked over to the wall and began to knock it down. It went much quicker than it had in previous attempts, likely due to both my stone breaking and punching abilities growing.

  I took several deep breaths of the fresher air the moment the wall came tumbling down, further helping to calm the terror that was still threatening to overwhelm me. Hugging the wall of the room, I moved to the corner, careful not to step too far onto the platform, and made myself a new set of handholds before triggering the trap again. The floor collapsed, I dropped down, and this time landed without an issue.

  With that out of the way, I quickly opened the hidden door again and located the backpack. Everything was exactly as it had been the first time I had found it. There had been no change to any of it. Just as I suspected, I could not leave any messages to myself between lives, and while a slight disappointment, there was no surprise.

  With my body still in perfect condition, I decided to work my way around the spike trap, making all of the needed holes in the walls for later. This time, I would take both of the torches with me from the room, as well as the two in the safe room. I didn’t have a plan just yet, but the bare bones of an idea had started rattling around in my head.

  I figured if I could open the door to the scorpion without being in front of it, it was possible I could use the ample amount of wood and fabric I had access to in an attempt to effectively kill it with fire. That was the easy part of the plan, though. I still needed to work out how to get the fire onto the scorpion.

  I dragged the desk and chair all the way to the upper hallway I had last died in with the intention of using the bed sheet, torn into strips, to work as both a way to hold the wood to the ceiling above the door and as a trip wire I could pull to release the bundle. This was, of course, much easier said than done, as precision punching stone is both incredibly painful and difficult to actually do. My first several dozen attempts at creating a way to tie the sheet up there just resulted in crumbling the stone each time, but finally, after many more failures, I was able to connect two of the holes, leaving a strong point to tie on to and use as a pulley.

  Was the only reason I managed to do it at all the increase in my masonry knowledge? It had felt like I could more easily spot the right places to hit. Interestingly, still nothing had progressed past level four. I had a feeling that meant something, but no real way to know what yet.

  After I was sure I had the sheet strips secured how I wanted them, I tied them around the furniture, pulled them up using the holes I had bore into the walls. It felt like it took forever, but the effort looked to have been worth it. The desk and chair were now hanging above the door, attached in a way that if I released one of the strips in my hand, they would crash down on any unsuspecting victim.

  The notifications agreeing with me felt like another good sign. I took one last look over my makeshift trap and decided it was the best I could currently do. I grabbed one of the lit torches and tossed it up onto the mess and waited until a decent fire was going.

  I carefully turned the door knob and and threw the door open, keeping my body to the side of the doorway the entire time. The stinger once again shot out from the opening, but this time it found nothing but air. Clicking sounds of hard legs on stone started as the scorpion lumbered through the door.