Nokstella, deep within the Eternal City.
Horace stopped, leaned against a wall with a silvery-gray metallic sheen, rubbed his aching eyes hard, and cursed under his breath.
"This damned place!"
Unlike in the game, the real Nokstella was vast and complex to a despair-inducing degree.
Countless silvery-gray buildings interlocked, overlapped, and extended outward, forming a dizzyingly three-dimensional honeycomb.
There were no roads here, only countless lifts, identical-looking palaces, narrow bridges running through the middles of buildings, and countless identical-looking junctions covered in glowing moss.
The eternal false stars overhead cast an even silvery-white glow, supplemented by the ubiquitous Eternal Lights, leaving even the shadows pale.
This scene, at once bright and dim, not only dried out his eyes but also made his sense of direction and distance increasingly unreliable.
Horace had lost count of how many times he had reached a seemingly familiar corner, only to find a strange yet familiar scene ahead.
"Bad planning... I should've asked that swordsmanship instructor for a rough map, or found a guide." Horace felt somewhat annoyed.
Just as he was considering whether to risk being laughed at by calling out to a patrolling Nox Monk, an indescribable feeling quietly surfaced at the edge of his awareness.
Some mysterious intuition told him to go that way.
The sensation was familiar, somewhat resembling the pull he had felt when he had the Gate of Myriad Laws fabricate the fate of an "encounter with the moon" to find the Moon Boat.
Another aftereffect of that 'fate'? Horace grew wary.
He took a deep breath, focused on that faint intuition, and tried to follow its guidance.
He followed the sensation almost blindly.
There was no logic whatsoever to this way of walking, and some places did not even look like paths. (Message: path ahead.)
Yet strangely, he