With the darkness no longer ever present, I was now sure the notifications were only appearing in my mind. I still had no idea why they were coming, and considering I couldn’t remember much of my life before this, it was impossible for me to even be sure they weren’t normal. A feeling deep inside me, though, rebelled against the idea that they were a natural part of my existence, and that was hard to ignore.

  I blinked several more times as I carefully stepped over the rubble in front of me, taking deep gulps of glorious air. Now that I could taste the air in this new room, it hit me just how stale it had been in my previous death chamber. I still didn’t understand the purpose of all this. Had my kidnapper’s goal really been to see how long it would take me to break down a wall to find my escape? Did that make me a mouse in someone’s maze?

  At least I now had light in this nightmare, and this time a clear exit on the other side of the path. Considering my previous room, I doubted it would be as simple as getting to the door, but I had little choice in the matter. The only way out I could see was across this seemingly empty stretch of stone floor.

  I scanned the walls, looking for any real differences between the room I had started in and this new one, and from where I stood, they looked like the same rough stone that I had just spent the last several minutes bloodying my fists on. I bent over and picked up some of the rubble of the wall I had managed to destroy. It was obvious in hindsight just how I had managed to accomplish this at all. The stone was, at best, a couple of inches thick. It had purposely been made thinner here, which explained the slight variation in temperature on the surface of the wall.

  On either side corridor was a single torch about halfway down attached to the wall. I wanted one of those torches, possibly both if I could easily extinguish the second for relighting later. I needed to fully examine my starting chamber before moving on. And doing that required more light.

  Tentatively, I placed a foot out in front of me, climbing carefully over the rubble. The ground felt solid below me. That was a plus. While I couldn’t see any other apparent traps, it didn’t mean there weren’t any. Considering the ceiling of the last room, I doubted this room was some safe haven.

  Two more steps into the room and nothing had happened so far. Just a couple more, and I’d be able to retrieve a torch. As I took my next step and felt the ground below me give way, I quickly tried to pull my foot back, only to realize it was cascading all the way back to where I had entered. Before I could even attempt to leap, I lost my footing and fell onto the waiting floor below.

  At least, I wished I had. Once again, the creator of this place proved their twisted mind as several parts of my body fell hard onto a bed of spikes. Worse still was the pain as more of the former floor collapsed onto my extremities, pushing them further into the protrusions. The pain was horrible, and the new notifications did little to dull it.

  I was sure the little that had been done came from the pain tolerance increase, but the amount was honestly hard to tell if it came from the blood loss and my fading grasp on life or the ability itself. My final thought as the light faded from my eyes yet again was how much I hated spike traps.

  I bolted awake and instantly felt a shudder run across my whole body. The last death had somehow felt more horrific than any so far. And the worst part was it would almost certainly not be the last. I would need to get across that corridor, and my options were still only trial and error as I pushed these strange abilities high enough to make it possible.

  Immediately, I walked to the same wall I had broken in the last life and started punching yet again. There was no reason to waste time in here with the limited air. I could continue formulating my plan once that problem was at least solved.

  I was rewarded with two more level-up notifications for my effort. They seemed to be slowing down. I assumed the filled-in squares I saw during the notification were a measure of progress, but I had no way to see that progress, at least as far as I knew, until it reached one hundred percent. I wasn’t sure it really mattered that I couldn’t, but it would be interesting to observe. It was possible I could use that knowledge to figure out a growth rate and further extrapolate how useless an action towards increasing an ability was.

  I sighed as I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on what was ahead of me. There was nothing I could see on the floor that had triggered the trap, and I didn’t remember feeling any sort of pressure plate when I took that final step. It had just seemed like my presence had been the trigger. Was there some mechanism watching for anyone to get that far? Grabbing some of the rubble nearby, I tossed a piece into the center of the path.

  I wasn’t entirely sure what I was testing for, but as the path hadn’t collapsed from the stones, that did tell me a few things. It either took something bigger or something more human-shaped to set it off. I turned back to some of the standing wall and carefully ripped off a much bigger chunk of it than the previous pulverized parts.

  That was potentially another useful ability. If I ended up needing to trigger the trap and climb my way through, increasing my grip was just the start of everything I’d need to learn. I tossed the chunk into the center of the corridor, being careful to keep myself in my starting room. The floor gave way again, and at the same time it did, I heard a clicking noise above my head and then felt an intense pain for a split second.

  I bolted awake to a few more notifications, not entirely sure what had just happened.

  After reading through exactly what they were, I had an idea on how I had died. When the floor trap in the other room was triggered, it had to have triggered the ceiling here to drop as well. So much for setting off the trap and climbing down into hole, though maybe not. Was I strong enough to make my own handholds in the wall?

  I knocked down the wall yet again, this time to no notifications. Now, I was certain that it took more effort to get to higher levels. What was the highest I had seen so far? Four? That seemed right, but I wished I had a way to view this all as a list. Still, that was a problem for later. I wanted somewhere safe to sit and possibly stay alive for more than thirty minutes at a time before I tried to contemplate anything like that.

  Carefully, making sure not to tread too far into the corridor, I stepped back into the next room. I took a couple of swings at the wall to my left, and while I did manage a few dents into it, the wall seemed much harder than the one that had separated these two rooms. Several blows later, I was able to reasonably hold myself aloft, gripping the spots I had just made.

  Now the next question was how did I trigger the trap while holding on? The answer was I had to do it very quickly. I needed to toss the rubble chunk into the air and immediately grasp my new safety holds before the floor fell apart. With the plan in mind, I went about enacting it, and to my utter surprise, this time, it worked. The floor was gone, and the room I had come from now was blocked off by a new column that had collapsed downward, proving that, yes, that was how I had died last time. I gained three notifications for my efforts.

  Careening my neck, I managed to get a view of the room below me. The spikes seemed spread out enough that if I carefully dropped myself, I should be able to avoid them. Steeling myself for any possible failure, I judged the best landing spot and released my grip, aiming for for safety.