We step through the door, ready to face dark corridors, moving walls, and hungry Minotaurs. Instead, we’re in a hospital waiting room.

  It’s a square room, tiny, a sterile box bathed in a light that seems to come from everywhere at once. The walls are white, immaculate, without a single crack. The floor is white. The ceiling is white. There’s no exit door, no window, and no furniture.

  A minimalist system window appears briefly in the center of the room, flashes once, and fades away.

  [System]: Welcome to Level Zero.

  And that’s it. No explanation. Just a “Zero” that doesn’t bode well. In the four corners of the room, four runic circles are painted on the floor, each in a bright, garish color: Red, Blue, Green, Yellow.

  Chris spins around, his shield ready to parry an attack that doesn’t come. “Where are we, Uncle Ben? Arthur said it was a Labyrinth! Where are the walls? Where are the hallways?”

  Kim lowers her rifle, unsettled by the narrow space. “There’s no exit. We’re trapped in a box.”

  I rub my face, a bitter laugh stuck in my throat. “That asshole Arthur… Arthur’s help is like a Chinese IKEA manual. Technically it’s information, but it doesn’t help you assemble the shelf.”

  I step toward the center of the room. “He called it a ‘Labyrinth’. We thought of Theseus, of stone walls and dead ends. It’s much worse. It’s a Teleporter Labyrinth.”

  I point to the colored circles. “It’s old-school Game Design. Like the Saffron City Gym in Pokémon or those twisted dungeons from retro JRPGs. Every rune teleports us to another identical room, which probably has four circles itself. There are maybe a hundred rooms, a thousand rooms, all the same. Logically, one of them must lead to the Boss. The others? Just endless loops or traps. It’s a navigation nightmare.”

  Chris turns pale. “But… how do we know which one to take? Is it luck?”

  “It’s never luck, kid. It’s logic… or memory. We’re gonna have to map this mess out mentally.”

  I walk toward the Green circle. “Come on. We’re going to test the mechanic. I guarantee there’s an activation condition.”

  I step onto the green circle. A third of the circle lights up with a soft glow. Nothing happens. No teleportation. I reach out my hand toward Kim. “Come on. Step on it.”

  Kim, wary, places her boot next to mine. The second third of the circle lights up. Still nothing.

  “Chris, your turn,” I say.

  The kid joins us on the circle. As soon as his foot touches the floor, the last third lights up. The circle is complete. A vibration runs through our bodies.

  “There,” I say. “Mandatory group mechanic. To activate a teleporter, the whole squad has to be on it. Impossible to send a scout. We move together, or we die together.”

  I look at my two companions. “The question is: is the logic as simple as Pokémon?”

  Chris swallows hard. “Do we try the Green?”

  “We try the Green. Get ready. If we land in a hostile zone or if it smells like sulfur, we don’t think, we jump immediately on another color. We keep moving.”

  The green circle pulses one last time, and the world disappears in an emerald flash.

  The emerald flash dissipates. I look around me. White walls. White floor. White ceiling. No door. No window.

  “Did we move?” Chris asks, anxious. “It looks like the exact same room.”

  “No, look at the floor,” I say. In the first room, the Green rune was in the northeast corner—if we consider our arrival point as South. Here, it’s in the opposite corner. The Red and Blue have also swapped places. “It’s another room,” I confirm. “It’s a copy-paste job, but the layout changes.”

  I scratch my beard. “Okay. Test number two. We’re going to check the spatial logic. In a normal dungeon, teleporter A leads to B, and B brings back to A. That’s the basics of backtracking. If we take the Green again, we should go back to the starting point.”

  “You want to go backward?” Kim asks.

  “I want to understand the rules before I go in blind. Come on, everyone on the Green. We’re backtracking.”

  We get back on the emerald circle. It lights up. Flash. When the light fades, we are… still in a white room. I immediately scan the corners. “Dammit…” I breathe.

  The Green is no longer in its previous place. The Yellow is in the center. The layout is different again. Brand new. Chris starts to panic slightly. “We aren’t back at the start, are we?”

  “No. We moved forward. Room 1, we took Green. We landed in Room 2, we took Green again, and we landed in this new one, Room 3.”

  I turn toward my companions, looking grave. “They’re one-way doors. Every teleporter sends us to a new instance. We can’t go back.”

  Kim frowns, gripping her rifle. “The problem, Ben, is how do we know if we’re moving in the right direction? For all we know, the Boss is at Room 10, and by taking Green twice, we went toward Room 500. We might be getting further and further from the exit without even knowing it. We’re navigating without a compass in an ocean of identical rooms.”

  “We can’t know. It’s Fog of War logic. For now, we’re navigating blind in a probability grid. But we’ve got a way to check if we’re going in circles. We’re going to play a hardcore version of Hansel and Gretel. In every room, we leave a trace. A piece of trash, a bit of cloth, anything. If we run into our trash in ten minutes, we’ll know we’re in a loop. If we don’t run into anything… it’s because we’re moving toward the unknown. And the unknown is generally where the Boss hides.”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  I turn toward our porter, hand outstretched. “Chris, give me a bit of a protein bar. It’s for science.”

  The kid obeys reluctantly, breaking off a corner of his precious ration. He crouches and places the crumb in the exact center of the room, on the immaculate white tile. We take a step back, watching the object as if it were a bomb. A second passes.

  Then, the floor under the crumb ripples slightly, like liquid mercury. In the blink of an eye, the bar is absorbed. Swallowed by the white floor.

  “It… it disappeared?” Chris stammers, feeling the tiles where the food was. “It’s smooth! There’s nothing left!”

  Kim frowns. “Dammit. Automatic zone cleanup. The dungeon deletes foreign entities.”

  I grit my teeth. If we can’t place objects, we can’t mark the way. “Okay. Plan B. If the floor eats everything, we’re going to mark the walls. Permanently.”

  I approach the nearest white wall. I raise my shovel, take a swing, and strike with all my strength using the blade edge. CLACK! The shock travels up my arms. The wall cracks. A beautiful, ugly, visible notch defaces the perfection of the room.

  “There. A permanent mark…”

  I don’t have time to finish my sentence. Before our eyes, the crack begins to glow with a white light. The matter fuses back together, smoothing out like a wound healing in fast-forward. In three seconds, the wall is perfectly smooth again. New. Virgin. I run my hand over it. Not a scratch. Not a bump. Nothing.

  I turn toward the other two. The shock is written on their faces. “It’s impossible…” Kim whispers. “The room resets. It reinitializes in real-time.”

  I let my shovel drop, a nervous laugh on the edge of my lips. “It’s worse than that. It’s an Amnesiac Labyrinth. It’s impossible to leave a trace. It’s impossible to know if we’ve already been here. Every room is the first room. We’re goldfish in an infinite bowl.”

  I look up at the uniform white ceiling, my eyes searching for an invisible camera or a dead pixel.

  “Level Zero, huh?” I shout at the void, dripping with contempt. “I’m starting to get the concept. Zero texture, zero decor, zero hope. This isn’t minimalism; it’s creative bankruptcy. The dev just hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on an infinite loop and went on a coffee break. Bravo, ‘artist’. It’s lazy as hell.”

  We stand there for a moment, the three of us planted in the middle of this white cube, exchanging lost looks. Chris fumbles with his bag strap, and Kim has the thousand-yard stare. The silence is absolute.

  “So…” Kim summarizes, voice hollow. “No logic, no landmarks… and we can’t even leave a breadcrumb trail.”

  I nod. “Exactly. We’re facing a gamer’s worst nightmare: pure RNG. The Random Number Generator.” I point to the colored circles. “We can’t map it. We can’t backtrack. The only thing left is the ‘Brute Force’ method. We move by feel. We pick a color, we jump, and we repeat. Until we hit a statistical miracle and stumble onto the Boss room.”

  “And if we never find it?” Chris asks softly.

  “Then we die here, clean and preserved in a self-cleaning room. At least it’s hygienic.”

  I walk toward the Red circle. “Come on. Stop thinking. Just walk. Red, because it’s the color of alerts and this is already pissing me off. Group up!”

  Flash. White room. White walls. Four runes: Red, Blue, Green, Yellow.

  “Great. That was useless. Let’s take Yellow.”

  Flash. White room. White walls. Four circles. I’m starting to get vertigo. My eyes burn from staring at this clinical whiteness.

  “Red again,” I say mechanically.

  Flash. White room. Chris groans softly. Kim looks like she wants to shoot the walls, even knowing it’s pointless.

  “Blue. For a change.”

  Flash. I blink, bracing for the same cursed decor. But something has changed. The light is different. Softer, almost bluish. I look at the floor. “Stop!” I shout, raising my hand. “Look!”

  Chris and Kim freeze. The four runic circles on the floor… they aren’t Red, Blue, Green, and Yellow anymore. The colors have mutated. In the northeast corner, there is a pure White circle. In the southeast, a deep Purple. In the southwest, a candy Pink. And in the northwest, a bright Orange. A twisted smile stretches my lips.

  “I take back what I said,” I say, pointing at the floor. “My ‘infinite fishbowl’ theory was wrong. This isn’t just an amnesiac labyrinth looping stupidly. It’s segmented.”

  “What do you mean?” Chris asks.

  “The palette. If it were random, we’d have the primary colors again. Here, we have a new set. That means there’s a pattern. A structure.”

  I turn to Kim. “It means there’s progression. We triggered a hidden sequence. If we follow the logic, these new colors lead deeper… or to something worse.” I eye the four new options. “White, Purple, Pink, Orange. It looks like a My Little Pony color chart. What’s the play?”

  “Purple,” Kim states. “It’s the Epic tier color. Fits the progression curve.”

  We step onto the amethyst circle.

  FLASH. When the light fades, my heart skips a beat. White walls. White floor. And in the corners… Red, Blue, Green, Yellow.

  “Dammit!” Chris shouts, frustrated. “We’re back at the start!”

  Kim grits her teeth. “It was a trap. Purple was a reset. We lost our progress.”

  “Or we just switched segments,” I nuance, perplexed. “Maybe these primaries aren’t the ‘start’, just another random room. But I admit, it smells like a critical fail.”

  We look at each other, lost. The logic just shattered.

  “Okay,” I say, massaging my temples. “Don’t panic. We test the other bases. Let’s try Green.”

  FLASH. White room. Red, Blue, Green, Yellow.

  “Again?!” Chris exclaims. “We’re going in circles! It’s hell!”

  I unscrew my flask and take a small sip to clear the fog. “Okay. Purple resets us, Green stalls us. Let’s think. The first time we saw the new colors, what circle did we come from?”

  Chris thinks for a second. “Blue. We took Blue right before.”

  “Then we take Blue again,” I state.

  We move to the azure circle.

  FLASH. I look down. White. Pink. Purple. Orange.

  “We’re back!” Kim cries out. “We found the second palette!”

  “But look closely,” I say, pointing at the floor. The colors are the same, but they moved. The White moved south, the Orange moved north. “It’s not the same room,” I analyze.

  I’m starting to understand, and I hate it. “It’s a giant keypad. We have to enter the right color combination to unlock the door. We found the first digit: Blue. Now, we have to find the second one among these.” I rub my beard, a disillusioned smile on my lips. “Purple was a dead end. Blue was the key. Now… we take White.”

  Kim looks at me, skeptical. “Are you sure? It’s a one-in-three chance. If we mess up, we start over.”

  I take a small sip from my flask and say, looking bored: “Absolutely sure. I figured out the level design. I was looking for mathematical patterns, complex logic… I overthought it. It’s Level Zero. This is the tutorial for babies. The solution has to be stupid. It’s Baby’s First Dungeon Design.”

  Without waiting, I step onto the immaculate circle. Kim and Chris, having no better plan, join me.

  FLASH. New room. Same white walls, same ceiling. But on the floor, the colors have changed again. Red. Brown. Black. Gray.

  Chris lets out a sigh of relief. “New colors! That means we’re moving forward, right?”

  I don’t even bother analyzing the room. I walk with purpose toward the northeast corner. “Come on, let’s not linger. Everyone on Red.”

  Chris stops dead. “Red? But… why? We already saw that at the start! Why not try Black or Brown? Doesn’t that feel more ‘Final Boss’?”

  I turn to them, looking bored. “No need to test. I have the solution. This riddle is a patriotic joke.”

  I point to the invisible rooms behind us. “First room, we took Blue. Second room, we took White. Third room, we take Red.”

  Kim widens her eyes. “Blue… White… Red?”

  “The French flag,” I confirm with a heavy sigh. “We’re on the ‘France’ server, Paris zone. The access code is just our damn flag. To think I had to fire up my neurons for this… I feel like I used a supercomputer to open a tin can. It’s low-level nationalism coded by a system that read France for Dummies.”

  Kim and Chris look at each other, stunned. They expected a magic formula or a Fibonacci sequence.

  “That was it?” Chris breathes.

  I step on the red circle. “Level Zero,” I say. “Come on. Let’s see if the Boss wears a beret and a baguette.”