Chapter 434: The Ninth Floor of the Tower of Choice
The labyrinth inside the Tower of Choice was indeed incredibly complex. Ye Feng spent nearly five months just to break through the eighth floor. To put it in perspective, the maze alone on the eighth floor covered an area of 393,216 square meters—nearly four billion possible paths. Finding the single correct path among nearly four billion options was unimaginably difficult. Under normal circumstances, with Ye Feng’s mental strength, it would take almost four years of non-stop effort to complete such a task.
However, starting from the sixth floor, Ye Feng realized that calculating over a hundred million paths was a waste of time. Out of desperation, he had an idea: he created ten physical clones, which, along with his main body, began exploring eleven different routes simultaneously. This approach reduced the time required by about ten times, allowing him to find the exit from the sixth floor, which originally would have taken nearly three months, in just one week.
The seventh floor was completed in twenty days, while the eighth floor took slightly longer—three months. Adding the nearly twenty days spent on the first five floors, it took a total of about five months.
Before reaching the ninth floor, Ye Feng estimated that, at his usual pace, if the area of the ninth floor doubled again, it would take him about fifteen years to explore all the paths. With the help of his clones, and if he wasn’t too unlucky, one year should be sufficient to find the correct path.
But when Ye Feng arrived at the ninth floor, the maze’s layout left him utterly stunned. The length, width, and height of the room had indeed doubled, and its total area had quadrupled—this was true. What troubled Ye Feng was that the maze’s walls could move. Although the entrance and exit locations remained fixed, the internal paths kept changing constantly. The moment he saw the maze, he was shocked.
“There must be a pattern to these changes. If there’s no pattern, passing through would rely solely on luck—a chance of one in nearly 16 billion to succeed on the first try. But that’s meaningless. From the first to the eighth floor, the focus has always been on training mental strength and its application. This floor can’t exist without purpose.” Ye Feng understood this from his experiences in the Tower of Choice.
After realizing this, Ye Feng slowly closed his eyes and used his mental strength to examine the maze over and over again. Instead of attempting to calculate the paths, he simply observed their changes silently.
A day passed quickly, and he didn’t open his eyes. A week also passed swiftly, yet there was still no sign of movement from him. A month finally passed… Nearly six months were about to end, and on that day, Ye Feng finally opened his eyes. With a bitter smile, he shook his head. “So that’s how it is. I overcomplicated things. After observing for nearly half a year, I found that the movement of the maze walls never repeated itself. Every time, after six months, the movement led to a different location. But there was one thing I overlooked from the start: every 24 hours, a clear straight path appeared on six of the walls. It’s only now that I realize that following that straight path results in a shorter total distance than when I passed the eighth layer last time. However, this straight path only appears for the duration of a cup of tea. If the piece hasn’t reached the exit by then, the attempt must start over. And there are at most three attempts in total…”
Although he had discovered what seemed to be a pattern, Ye Feng was very worried that his mental strength might not be sufficient to push the piece to the exit within that time frame. If that were the case, his current attempts would be a waste of opportunities. After struggling for a while, Ye Feng began his first attempt. Timing it precisely, he poured all his mental energy into pushing the piece forward, which weighed as much as a mountain.
After nearly half a year of training, due to limitations in his soul’s strength, Ye Feng’s mental power was still at the peak of the divine realm, but both in quality and quantity it was incomparable to what it was half a year ago. Half a year prior, his mental power was 30 times that of peers at the same level. After half a year of effort, it had now increased to 100 times that of peers—actually, it had reached 100 times in just about four months—before hitting a bottleneck with no further improvement.
Fortunately, during the first four months, as the quantity of his mental power increased, its quality also improved slowly. After reaching the bottleneck, there was finally a significant leap in quality, making it much easier to push the piece later on. Yet even on the eighth layer, the effort remained considerable. This was why Ye Feng was worried about the ninth layer. After all, pushing through the eighth layer was already very difficult; the piece on the ninth layer would likely be even harder to move.
The moment he channeled his mental energy, Ye Feng felt an extreme difficulty. He was certain that under these conditions, the piece could never reach the destination.
As expected, after only reaching one-third of the way, new changes occurred—the once unobstructed path became completely impassable. The chess piece immediately returned to the entrance on its own. Ye Feng helplessly withdrew his mental energy, shook his head with a bitter smile, and said, “As expected, it doesn’t work! My mental energy isn’t strong enough!” Having reached this conclusion, Ye Feng took a deep breath and took out a total of twenty orange Primary Deity Essences from his storage ring—these were the spoils he had gained from previous battles plus those obtained in the secret realm. Taking the lightest-colored one, a black energy swirled around Ye Feng’s fingertips before slowly sinking into that black deity essence. His soul, nourished by this energy, began to grow rapidly. More than five months passed, and finally, Ye Feng opened his eyes—the twenty Primary Deity Essences had been completely absorbed by him. In the past, absorbing just one such essence would have taken months, but his strength had improved greatly, and the change in his mental energy also promoted the evolution of his soul. In just five months, the strength of his soul reached the peak of the Primary Deity level. Although he had absorbed the essences of over twenty powerful beings at the Primary Deity level, this was still not enough for him to break through to the next level. Yet even so, it was already incredibly remarkable. Ye Feng slowly opened his eyes and looked at the maze ahead, his expression neither sad nor happy. His mental energy surged forth, directly controlling the chess piece to move forward. The moment the chess piece started moving, the corners of Ye Feng’s mouth finally lifted slightly…