Poet knight: Yohan falkvo Yelhan

20.

After having lunch and reaching the grandmaster's office, George already noticed the grandmaster standing there with Mary. As soon as she saw him approach, she took out a metal bracelet with quarter-iceberg seals on it, and when put it around George's wrist, telling him that it was a pass to the event. Then, Theophania grabbed George and Mary's wrists and closed her eyes, focusing, and then told them both to also close their eyes. 

In a moment's notice, the floor under their feet, despite remaining as hard as before, started moving in a rhythmic pattern, and then Theophania told them to open their eyes and follow her. Upon opening his eyes, George noticed that he got transported to a cave overgrown with flesh which had a multitude of stone platforms with a similar seal to the one on the grandmaster's bracelets. The largest of them, which was the one the trio manifested on, was just enough for three people to stand on. There were three platforms similar in size to their origin and a couple dozens of smaller ones distributed all over the room. The walls of the cave were narrowing towards the end the trio was heading to, and the narrowing ended in a narrow corridor that was constantly bending. George immediately activated "Yash ve yohaya" to help investigate the place, but he was met with an overwhelmingly bright soul medium concentration with no pattern, prompting him to dispel his ability. 

After well over a hour of walking through the bending corridor, the trio reached a chamber similar to their original location, but it was much larger and with seemingly over a hundred stone platforms, each with a simple circular seal with four stylized lightnings extending towards the center. The grandmaster quickly searched for the largest platform and headed there. When all three visitors got onto the plate, the grandmaster grabbed the wrists of both students and told them to close their eyes. In a moment's notice, the "ground" changed its movement direction, and when the grandmaster told them to open their eyes, there was another hallway ahead of them. It was relatively straight, but its material seemed to be more similar in consistency to fat tissue in contrast to semisolid muscle from the previous hallway. 

George didn't want the group to waste time traversing the sea of fat, so he considered freezing it over with several slashed, but then immediately rejected the idea since it would put the others in danger. He directed his soul medium into his feet and carefully stepped into the liquid, but it turned solid as soon as he landed his foot on it and the frozen ohase of it seemed enough to support his weight. Theophania and Mary entered the liquid, which seemed to reach around the middle of the waist of either of them, and started getting through the goo while George continued walking on top of the fatty goo in careful steps, since if he had stepped too fast, the fat wouldn't have time to fully freeze before his foot completely lands on it. Even embracing such a difficult way of transportation, George was able to cross the corridor when the grandmaster and his fellow contestant were only halfway through even despite him needing to take frequent breaks because of the difficulty of it. While the two others were getting through, George walked around the end platform and then sat legs crossed and started trying his ethereal body excercise. Two hours later he was called by the grandmaster who had already climbed the platform to join the formation. As soon as he stood up, and closed his eyes,he noticed concentrated sunlight hitting his eyelids, indicating it was already sunset there. 

When he opened his eyes, he noticed that the trio was in the outskirts of a massive city. George could not compare it to anything he had seen personally even if he didn't take a mile-tall pyramidal building in its center, which he suspected to be the temple, into account. The only comparison he could come up with for the city was a mix of a generic futuristic megapolis and an early industrialized city. It seemed to be surprisingly well-ordered for its size, and the only buildings visible from afar were located extremely tightly together, mostly around the thing George assumed to be the temple, but some of those structures were visible in quite distant areas of the city and the pattern of the clusters' spread sort of reminded George of the distribution of the temple platforms in the other dimension.

George's borderline daydreaming was interrupted when the group entered an underground tunnel lit by weird lamp panels and approached a gateway system similar to what the subway at his home city used to be. The grandmaster calmly approached one of the gates which had a white-colored frame and placed her wrist against the frame. After a moment, the gate got unlocked and she was able to get through, but it blocked the way as soon as she passed. Mary went next, repeating the same procedure, and then George did the same. When he passed the gate, he went down a short staircase and reunited with the rest of the group at the lower part of the station, which looked like somewhat old-fashioned. After just a minute, the train arrived. It was looking surprisingly smooth and streamlined, and its motion was also refined far beyond George's expectations. When the doors opened, only a few people exited the train, so the trio managed to enter quickly. Unfortunately, there was no place to sit down in the carriage they were in, but neither Theophania nor Mary seemed to mind standing for, as George soon found out, one station with that line and six stations after a transfer.