Dario was frowning at the burgundy Ki as it slowly dissipated, until a thought came to him.

  “Each floor is supposed to have aura and Ki behaving a certain way, right?” he asked. “In the Basement it’s to do with Ki lingering in corpses and being able to take foreign Ki into your body. But it’s different on other floors, isn’t it?”

  “That is correct. On the second floor, the Floor of Mist, aura is abundant and tends to spread in a gaseous form. On the Molten Floor, the aura behaves differently, more like a liquid, as if it were heavier. You will find more lakes and such instead of the common mists of the second floor.”

  “Right. So what if, on this floor, there’s something to do with emotions? I swear I’ve been seeing this weird type of Ki and nothing else seems to make sense.”

  Nika stayed silent, but she was blinking rapidly, which he’d come to associate with her considering something.

  “I have not heard of mental Ki existing outside of what Controllers use, but… Well, what exactly is your theory?” she asked.

  “Err… that on this floor, people can somehow generate something like emotional Ki? Maybe by feeling those emotions? This dark mist appeared right when I was feeling shame.”

  “Not a very precise theory, but still one that can be easily tested,” Nika said, looking meaningfully back at the altar.

  With a heavy sigh, he shuffled back over, this time preparing a memory of him getting a spanking for trying to steal food before grabbing the crystal handles, to avoid the thing going rogue and digging up anything worse.

  He tried to zone out his surroundings, letting himself sink into the memory and really feel the shame. He thought of the other people, what they would have thought of him, of Nika in the room seeing all this. When a thin line of smoke seemed to drift out from the skin of his chest, his face lit up, but then the shame winked out.

  He went at it again, using a memory of when he’d had a terrible misunderstanding with a girl he thought had liked him that ultimately led to him getting slapped in the face. This time, he was ready for the smoke to appear and stayed with that feeling of shame, letting it grow. When the red mist grew to about the size of his hand, he tried to take control of it, but it was too slippery.

  It took another two rounds of embarrassment before he figured out that he had to clamp down on the physical feeling of the emotion in his body at the same time as controlling the Ki with his mind. When that finally clicked, he managed to lead a tendril of it away from the central mass of smoke and into the crystal.

  It was only a hunch, but then the crystal lit up with burgundy light.

  “Yes! It worked! Did you see that?”

  When Nika didn’t respond, he looked over to see her looking out at the space in front of her chest, carrying a deep frown as she ground her teeth. As he watched, a small puff of bright red smoke began to float before her chest, but it wasn’t the deep burgundy of shame.

  “What is that?”

  “Anger,” she growled. “It is quite… accessible for me at the moment.” She took a deep breath, the bright red smoke fading as her expression returned to calm, before her eyes lit up. “But this is excellent news! It seems that your theory has been confirmed twice over. A floor that contains emotional Ki… Remarkable. The quote about controlling emotions was then meant quite literally.”

  “Right,” Dario nodded. “Well then, let’s see what happens when I dump a bunch of shame into these crystals.”

  Armed with a memory of his pants slipping to his ankles in public, he allowed more of the dark red smoke to build before guiding it into one of the crystals. The burgundy glow increased over time, until it looked mostly saturated, so he moved onto the next one. Only, he ran out of shame. The feeling wasn’t strong enough and the other memories of shame he could think of involved even more nudity so he really didn’t want to use them. Not wanting to give up, Dario opened his mouth.

  “I don’t know how to swim,” he said in a small voice.

  Nika snorted. “I know. I saved you from that pool of water, remember? You were splashing around like a muskrat.”

  “Oh yeah, good one, that was really embarrassing.” The smoke was coming back now and he focused on guiding a tendril into the left crystal, but it still wouldn’t be enough.

  “I don’t really know how to do math. I can read, but only slowly.” A bit more smoke billowed in front of his chest, which he kept feeding into the crystal. “I don’t know the meaning of half the fancy words you use.” Again, a bit more smoke, but he still needed more for a final push.

  So without warning, he farted. It was a drawn out, rumbling sound that echoed in the empty chamber.

  “By the pillar, that’s disgusting! In front of a lady? Have you no manners?” Nika exclaimed after a few breaths, as if she’d needed a moment to accept what had happened.

  “I’m sorry,” Dario groaned, voice thick with embarrassment. “I’ve been holding it for hours. We had to move quietly and I was scared of being beaten up.”

  With that final admission, there was a thick, compact cloud of smoke billowing in front of him which he guided into the crystals until they both lit up.

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  “Yes!” Dario shouted as a loud click sounded through the chamber and the thick stone doors began to slide open. “Say what you will, but that fart really saved the day.”

  Nika was glaring at him. “I will let it pass only this once, due to the unique circumstances.”

  The door slowly opened to reveal the next chamber, which looked identical to the current one.

  “We’re actually doing it,” he said, eyes beaming with excitement as he looked at Nika. “We’re cracking the mystery of this floor. ‘The dream must start within our heart’, it has to refer to this, right? It has to be something about controlling this weird emotional Ki.”

  A rare smile crept onto Nika’s face as she nodded back at him. “Yes, I believe this was a great leap forward. It’s unbelievable to think that we might be the first people to learn about this in hundreds, or maybe even a thousand years.” She frowned. “Quite hard to believe indeed. But we will not find many answers here.”

  There was a loud grinding sound as the door got stuck, but it was already most of the way open.

  “Well,” Dario said, gesturing with his hand to the doorway. “I do believe you’re up next.”

  The next room was exactly the same as the last, white walls surrounding a black altar with two crystal handles, except for one thing: instead of shame, the word ‘GLEE’ was carved into the wall.

  Dario was grumbling about the unfairness of Nika getting glee, but he stopped when he noticed that she looked uncomfortable.

  “What’s up?”

  “I… I’m not sure that…” she faltered, then cleared her throat and straightened her back. “It is hard for me to find qualifying memories, that is all. It may take a while.”

  Dario shrugged. “Sure, take your time.”

  This was another one of those words he wasn’t sure about, but he thought glee was basically like happiness. For him, dozens of memories sprang to mind. Every time a new heap of trash was dumped and he could go look for treasure. Or when it was festival time, or when he was hungry and knew a good dinner was waiting for him. In fact, he was probably full of glee right now, just thinking about how they were solving thousand-year old mysteries. But if it was so hard for Nika to come up with memories of glee, maybe it meant something else after all.

  Nika stood there for a good while, looking at the altar as if she was deciding whether to fight it or reason with it, until she finally stepped forward and put her hands on the crystals.

  Again, there were some initial flickering images and garbled sounds, but then the memory began to play out on the wall.

  A young Nika, barely twelve at his best guess, was in a dark place, surrounded on all sides by pitch black stone. It reminded him a lot of the cave they’d been in him. Hadn’t she said something about her family owning mines?

  She was panting, covered in sweat, but her eyes were focused as she moved cautiously forward. Seemingly out of nowhere, a thin rod of stone snapped out at her, but she reinforced her forearms with Ki just in time for it to break against her skin. Going by her torn clothes and scraped skin, this had been going on for a while.

  The traps got even more dangerous as she went on, stone darts launched at her head as a plate flashed out low, stone rods turning into sharp spikes. There were short breaks where what he thought was a puzzle was presented in the black stone walls, where the exhausted girl had to hurriedly figure out some type of pattern before it closed off again.

  The memory continued for a while longer until the darkened tunnels opened into a bright hall where the attacks finally stopped, young Nika collapsing from exhaustion.

  As she lay there, body bruised and battered, drenched in sweat, a middle-aged man walked up to her. He wore simple, yet expensive looking clothes, but his skin was remarkably smooth and almost shiny, like polished marble. There was a certain feel of heaviness and danger about the man that made Dario wonder what he would have looked like to his eyes, if he’d been there in the room with them.

  “Father!” the girl called out, pushing herself up with shaking arms to sit on her knees with her back straight. “I didn’t know you were here!”

  The man smiled down at her. “My little Nika. My precious little gemstone. You have done well, to pass this gauntlet at the age of eleven. Few have managed that in the history of our clan. You have made me proud.”

  Even though the little girl’s young body shook, too exhausted and wounded to stay upright, she was laughing, her face a picture of happiness. A single tear ran down her cheek as she beamed up at him, drinking in the praise.

  If that was a memory of glee, Dario thought, I hope we don’t get to see one of her suffering.

  In the room, a thick, golden cloud formed in front of Nika and she focused, but it didn’t move. As time passed and her expression grew increasingly frustrated, the golden Ki formed by her glee slowly dissipated.

  “How did you control this strange Ki? I can’t get a hold of it.”

  Dario explained how he’d done it, by somehow clamping down on the emotion at the same time as controlling the Ki itself, but it took a long time for Nika to catch on.

  “What helped for me was to think of it almost as a physical thing. The shame felt like something was squeezing my stomach and chest. So I focused on that and kind of imagined wrapping my arms around that feeling. When I did that, the Ki suddenly felt less slippery.”

  They ran through that same memory a dozen more times over the span of hours, until finally something clicked for her.

  Contrary to how quickly Dario’s embarrassment for the same memory had faded, this one moment of honest praise from her father seemed like a deep well of glee for Nika. Though she struggled to keep pushing the golden Ki into the crystals, there was never a shortage of it.

  After another five times running through, each time feeding a bit more into the crystals while a large part of the Ki was lost, the stone door rumbled open to reveal another white room with black altar. This time, the word carved into the wall was ‘FURY’. Nika stepped to the side, looking at him expectantly.

  Dario scratched his head, humming. “You know, I’m pretty laid back, all things considered. I barely ever get angry. Do you just wanna take this one and I’ll get the next?”

  Nika shook her head. “There must be a point to these exercises. If we take only the easy ones, we may feel like we are progressing while actually only treading water.”

  “Damn nobles and their love of discipline,” Dario muttered under his breath. “I guess that also means you don’t just wanna make holes in the walls and go straight to the end? We’ve already figured out the trick, anyway.”

  “Naturally. What would be the point of that? These exercises are meant to teach us how to wield the ephemeral Ki of this floor.”

  Dario narrowed his eyes at her, wondering if she was using fancy words on purpose now, but then he just shook his head and walked up to the altar. He didn’t like to feel angry, but if he was going to need enough of it to fill these two thirsty crystals, there wasn’t much of a choice.

  With a grimace, he put his hands on the crystals and began to relive some of the worst moments of his life.