Maze Information

The dizzying, high-speed spinning finally stopped. Su Wu landed steadily, while thuds sounded all around him.

Quite a few people had fallen straight to the ground and passed out.

A few people were missing, too. They had probably been lost somewhere.

The fate of being left battered and bruised in the desert was easy to imagine. In the end, they would all meet the same fate: death.

Only Su Wu and the caravan leader were still conscious and able to move.

Not a single camel or horse was in sight.

"Still, at least one person passed this time." The leader looked around at the people, sighing as he scratched the back of his head.

Su Wu ignored him and surveyed his surroundings.

The other man seemed to misunderstand.

"Oh, are you looking for the camels? Don't worry, they know the way back on their own," the leader said with a smile.

To keep his cargo from being lost, he'd bought magical beasts for his camels and horses. They were intelligent enough to find their way home. He'd even trained them before the exam, so they were probably used to it by now.

"What about these people?" Su Wu gestured toward the unconscious figures on the ground.

"The test began the moment we entered the desert, and naturally, they failed." The leader held up his Hunter License, smiling cheerfully and without mercy.

Every year, hundreds or even thousands of people died during the Hunter Exam. The odds of passing could be said to be less than one in a hundred.

"So you're just leaving them here to die..." Su Wu nodded and chuckled, rubbing his chin.

They were now in an underground maze, seemingly made of bluestone or some other hard material. The passageways branched off in every direction, stretching so far that their ends were out of sight, like endless corridors. There wasn't a speck of light, but the darkness didn't hinder the Six Eyes. Su Wu could see cobwebs and moss in every corner, along with dull, dried-up grayish-white and ocher stains.

The corridors hadn't been aired out in ages. They carried the musty, decaying smell peculiar to old buildings. Every breath seemed to draw in a fair amount of dust, along with a faint stench of rot.

Still, it smelled better than Meteor City.

But there were no bodies.

Why were there no bodies? The ocher stains were blood. Was the grayish-white stuff brain matter?

There were signs like these, but no trace of bodies. Did that mean... someone had disposed of all the corpses?

Without the Six Eyes, it would have been difficult for an ordinary person to notice any of this in the darkness.

"Is the next test to get through this maze?" Su Wu asked the leader beside him.

The man had one unconscious person tucked under each arm, another dangling from each hand, and one more slung over his back.

"Exactly. The information about the next test site is hidden somewhere in this maze. Good luck, kid!" He flashed a big, toothy grin, jumped up, and vanished down one of the corridors in just a few bounds.

Should he follow?

No. That path had to be the wrong one.

The man wasn't a candidate, and the people he was carrying had all failed. His job was to take the failures away, while Su Wu needed to find the information about the next test site somewhere in the maze.

Clearly, they were headed in different directions.

"So where should I go now..." The White-haired boy crouched on the ground, eyes closed as he considered his options.

There were so many passageways. Which one should he choose?

Every passageway had bloodstains. People had probably died in all of them.

Why had those people died? Were there traps?

In other words, every passageway had traps...

So it didn't matter which one he chose, did it?

He agonized over it for only three seconds before standing up and making his choice. He casually stepped into the nearest passageway on his left.

As soon as his left foot entered the passageway, he looked up at the walls on either side and above him. Nothing moved.

"Are there no traps?" he murmured, raising a hand to knock on the wall beside him.

Then he stood still and lifted his left hand. "Cang."

Black-and-blue energy appeared in his palm like a miniature black hole, and the surrounding air seemed to be sucked into it.

He gently pushed his hand forward, a look of anticipation on his face. With a curled lip, he supplied the sound effect: "Boom!"

The black-and-blue orb of energy shot away from him and rapidly expanded, plowing through the walls of the passageway. It finally seemed to hit a wall at the far end, setting off an explosion.

The scattered stones in the corridor shuddered as if a bomber had just passed through.

Arrows fell from both sides of the passageway, and rows of empty pits opened up beneath it, filled with sharp spears.

If he'd fallen in, he would have been riddled with holes.

He teleported all the way to the end of the passageway, only to find a pile of rubble.

There had originally been a huge boulder here, one of the traps. Cang had blasted it to pieces.

But two numbers were carved into the left-hand wall: 1 1.

Was this the information they meant? What did the two numbers stand for? Or were they some kind of code from the Hunter world that he needed to decipher?

But was this really the only clue? Su Wu pondered as his figure vanished again, returning to the starting point.

This time, he chose another passageway.

He raised his hand and unleashed Cang, the motion smooth as flowing water.

This time, the passageway ended with the roar of a beast.

So the traps included magical beasts, too.

After bombing every passageway, he'd found a few clues—

1 1, Banato, Aijin.

"Hmm... What does that mean?" Su Wu tried to piece the three clues together, but he couldn't make sense of them.

Banato and Aijin sounded like place names, but unfortunately, he wasn't familiar with the geography here.

At that, he took off his backpack and rummaged through it. Sure enough, he found a map.

It was a map of the continents.

"This is the Urubian Continent. Banato... Oh, it's a port. And Aijin... Aijin is another continent, the one where the Kajin Empire is located..." He looked at the place names marked on the map and nodded in realization.

Sid really was a thoughtful man. He'd prepared so much stuff. He probably wasn't doing this for the first time; he must have prepared supplies for people leaving before.

"Could 11 mean a date? Go to Banato or Aijin on January 1? Judging by the time, it should be Banato, right? At least it's on the Urubian Continent. Aijin is on another continent, and the map shows it's pretty far away."

"So I should first go to the port, then take some kind of transport to Aijin?" Su Wu quickly analyzed the situation.

Ah, maybe the test was about choosing the right mode of transport...

After all, the clues didn't say how to get to Aijin, and the continent was so vast that he had no idea where in Aijin he was supposed to go.

He thought with an expressionless face, then casually pulled a tissue out of his backpack to wipe away his nosebleed.

"But none of these passageways are the exit. It looks like the one the leader took is the only way out."

"If I'd followed the leader from the start, I could have gotten out, but then I would've missed the clues hidden in the other passageways..."

"I have to go through all of them." Su Wu calmly stepped into the passageway the leader had taken.

Tests that had taken previous candidates countless hours—and even cost them their lives—were steamrolled by him and finished in record time.

This maze wouldn't be usable as an exam site again for quite a while. It couldn't be used until the repairs were complete, at the very least.