The barriers closed one after another, sealing seventeen glowing cages at different heights across the vast vertical gulf. What had looked like simple floating platforms a moment earlier now revealed their true nature. These were not walls. They were layered spatial constructs woven from pure language—runes that twisted distance, folded direction, and locked containment into recursive loops. Every surface pulsed with shifting script that made the air inside denser, the space itself slightly wrong.
Brute force alone would be inefficient here. Only applications of your runes. The trial demanded deep rune knowledge combined with complex spatial calculations. The ones who understood that would move forward. The ones who did not would waste time and energy until the limit arrived.
Vark stood on one of the highest platforms, cold annihilation already flowing from his fingertips. He did not study the barrier. He erased it with his own annihilation runes.
