Jake was in a hurry to get back to the Count’s chamber, as he had a bad feeling in his gut. And no, it wasn’t from just being the center of attention and feeling like that time when he was a kid and was in a school play, with all the parents staring at him. Instead, this kind of bad feeling was the kind he got when someone was about to steal his shit.Okay, it was only was like that in retrospect. Because when Jake made it through the trap room and into the chamber, the silver coffin and altar were gone. He had only been gone for a few minutes to hunt down the Count down, and someone had taken that opportunity to rob him of his rightful loot?Yeah, that didn’t fly with him.His senses spread in the room as Jake focused on both Sense of the Malefic Viper and Hunter’s Tracking. There was no fucking way he was going to let the damn thief get away with it. Jake smelled the air and felt the mana, and soon picked up on something.There were three traces of beings in the chamber. The most po

This wasn’t Jake’s first time engaging with a magic puzzle, but it was his first time encountering this type. Before returning to Earth, the practice cauldron Villy had given him during his alchemy training session deployed similar methods to this gate’s magic puzzle. However, the cauldron had been focused on alchemy, while this gate was more of a regular and more general mana puzzle.Except… you couldn’t really call it a regular puzzle. It was like those weird puzzle games with ropes and rings you could buy as a gift to a friend to piss them off because you knew they sucked at those kinds of things—which was totally not something Jake had ever done.This brain puzzle did differentiate itself from even that by one huge thing: you couldn’t test things. One could also compare it to having to do a puzzle, and while you could see all the puzzle pieces, you weren’t allowed to misplace a single piece on the board. Doing that would result in being infected with a curse… In other words, every