“Rhys?”Nubi’s voice was close.“Rhys, can you hear me?”She wrapped an arm around his shoulder to steady him.Rhys heard every word.He just couldn’t feel her.Not even a little.“Nubi…?”His voice trembled with confusion.“I can hear you…”He frowned.“But…”“I can’t feel anything.”It wasn’t just that he couldn’t feel her hand.He couldn’t feel his own body either.The pressure beneath his feet had disappeared.The weight of his arms.The movement of his chest as he breathed.Everything was gone.If someone had told him he was floating through empty space, he would have believed them.With his eyesight already gone, there was nothing left to convince his mind that he was actually standing on solid ground.He felt completely untethered.Nubi inhaled sharply.“Oh no…”Her voice was filled with genuine alarm.“Please don’t tell me…”“You sacrificed your sense of touch.”Rhys thought he nodded.At least…He hoped he had.Without any feeling in his neck or body, he couldn’t even tell whe

On the twentieth day, Rhys finally broke.It had been five days since he lost his sense of touch.For five straight days, his brain had struggled to exist without the constant stream of sensations it had depended on since birth.Eventually, it reached its limit.Every waking moment felt wrong.Without feeling the ground beneath his feet or the weight of his own body, Rhys constantly felt as though he were floating through empty space.His mind could never settle on a single reality.Sometimes he felt as though he had drifted high into the sky, suspended in endless darkness with nothing beneath him.Other times, the exact opposite happened.He became convinced he was trapped inside a tiny box.The invisible walls seemed to close in around him until he could barely breathe.His chest tightened.His heartbeat raced.Claustrophobia gripped him so fiercely that he wanted to scream.The worst part was that he couldn’t even reassure himself.He couldn’t touch the walls.He couldn’t feel the f

By the forty-fifth day, Rhys had reached the halfway point of his stay inside the Snake-Men’s ancestral chamber.Looking back, he realized he had already survived the hardest part.Something had changed on the fortieth day.After finally accepting that there were things in life he would never be able to control, the constant frustration faded away.His mind became strangely clear.He stopped asking himself why he had lost his sword.He stopped questioning why he had to suffer through one punishment after another.Those questions no longer mattered.Instead, he focused on what would happen after all of this ended.By the time he walked out of the Chamber, he wouldn’t be the same person who had entered it.His body would be different.His mindset would be different.His mana reserves and control would be on an entirely different level.He would return to the academy with advantages no ordinary student could hope to match.From there, his next goal was obvious.He wanted to graduate at th

Losing his voice was supposed to make life inside the Chamber even more unbearable.Surprisingly, it didn’t.By that point, Rhys had already grown tired of hearing himself speak. Ever since his mind had settled, he rarely felt the urge to talk when he was alone.The only thing he truly missed was making Nubi laugh.Even then, it wasn’t as bad as he had expected.Whenever she came to feed him or check on him, she continued talking as though he could answer. After spending so much time together, she had become surprisingly good at reading him. More often than not, she understood what he wanted without him needing to say a single word.Their conversations had become completely one-sided, yet somehow they still felt natural.After accepting the fifth penalty, Rhys became even more helpless than before.He couldn’t move.He couldn’t speak.From the outside, he looked no different from someone lying in a coma.His mind remained perfectly awake.He could still hear everything around him.He c

By the seventy-fifth day, Rhys had made up his mind.Five penalties were enough.He had gained more than he had ever expected when he first entered the ancestral chamber, and whatever rewards waited for him after ninety days would already be enough to transform his future.There was no reason to gamble again.He had pushed his luck far enough.Still, whether he accepted another penalty or not, the evaluation itself couldn’t be skipped.So when Nubi came to collect him, Rhys quietly accepted that it was time.He imagined her sighing before throwing him over her shoulder the way she always did.The thought almost made him smile.Of course, he had no way of knowing if that was actually what happened.Without his voice, his sense of touch or echolocation, the outside world had become completely unreachable.He couldn’t tell whether he was still lying in bed or already halfway across the Chamber.For all he knew, Nubi might have carried him through ten different rooms before reaching the ev