There are a handful of floors. Humanity has reached three of them. Every single one of them is a fixed place that thousands of people go into and come back out of and write about, over and over, for decades.
Which means every floor generates its own six years of discoveries.
And I have already lived through those six years.
Not as a climber. That is the limit and I need to keep it in front of me, because it would be extremely easy to start thinking I have a walkthrough.
I never went up that Tower. I was a man with a surname and an office and no Ability, and everything I know about the floors came in sideways.
Clan reports I read because they were on my desk. News summaries. Public guides I skimmed. Christopher’s people talking at a table on the other side of a room while I ate.
I remember the big things because the big things get repeated until you cannot avoid them.
I remember almost none of the small ones.
And some of it is going to be wrong now anyway, because I have already spent a month changing things, and I have no idea yet how far that spreads.
But the big things are the ones that are worth having.
Nobody repeats a map coordinate for six years. They repeat the discovery that changed how everyone does it.
So my first objective on Floor One was not the clear.
I can clear it. Given the two documents on this desk and a Level Eleven build with eight Abilities in it, I am fairly confident I can clear it, and if I am wrong about that then everything else is academic anyway.
But everybody who walks in there tomorrow morning is going in with the same question, which is how do I get out of this alive and registered.
I am going in with a different one.
I am going to go and find the thing that nobody is going to notice for another six years, and I am going to have it first, and then I will clear the floor on the way out.
> **[Level: 11.]**
>
> **[EXP: 810/1,100.]**
>
> **[Health: 410/410.]**
>
> **[Mana: 250/250.]**
>
> **[Unassigned Attribute Points: 3.]**
Three points still sitting there.
I am keeping them until I have been in there once.
I said that yesterday about the bell and it is the same reason: I have a specific plan for that floor and I do not yet know which attribute the plan is going to be short of.
Three points is not much. Spending them on the wrong thing is permanent.
The bell was on the desk beside the guide and I put the chain back over my head before I did anything else, and the weight of it settled below my collarbone in the place it has settled every time.
Then the gauntlets, which the household had cleaned and which are the only piece of equipment I actually rely on.
Then everything else, in the order I have done it for four weeks, because a routine you do not have to think about is four seconds you get back later.
---
I went down the back stair rather than the front one, and I could hear the east hall the whole way.
They were still going at eleven at night.
Somebody was reading aloud again and two people were arguing about a load distribution and there was the sound of a case being closed and opened and closed.
I did not go in.
I stood at the bottom of the stair for about nine seconds and listened to twelve of the best Players in this region preparing to walk into a place with two conflicting reports about it.
Then I went back up to my room, alone, with a bell and a pair of gauntlets and two documents I had already read.
Both of those are the same building tonight.
Neither of them is safe.
---
I sat down on the end of the bed and opened the panel.
> **[TOWER]**
>
> **[Tutorial: Cleared.]**
>
> **[Tutorial Appraisal: SSS.]**
>
> **[Floor One: Available.]**
>
> **[Attempt Floor One.]**
There was a pause and I am not going to pretend there was not, but it was a different pause.
The Tutorial one was about whether I had any business being in the Tower at all. That got answered, comprehensively, by a woman ringing a bell over a district full of water.
This one is not about whether I belong in there.
This one is about whether six years of half-remembered other people’s reports are actually worth anything the moment I am standing in a place with my own two feet.
I have been carrying that memory around for a month like it is a weapon. Tonight is the first time I am going to point it at something and find out if it fires.
> **[Attempt Floor One.]**
> **[Floor One selected.]**
>
> **[Enter?]**
>
> **[YES] [NO]**
> **[YES.]**
---
The panel did not close. It got brighter.
It kept getting brighter until the light stopped being inside the frame.
Then it came out past the edges and went across the rug and up the wall behind it, flat and white and with nothing warm in it at all, and the corners of the room went first.
My ears changed. The pressure came down the way it does in a lift.
The twenty-one degrees lifted off my skin in about a second and what replaced it was nothing at all, on every part of me at once.
The bed stopped being under me.
I did not fall.
There was simply nothing holding my weight and nothing left to hold, and my boots lost the rug and did not find anything else, and the last thing in my head was not the clear condition and not the routes and not the appendix.
It was one clause in a nine-year-old account by a man who came home safely and never thought about it again.
---
Then the white went out of the world and my boots came down on something solid, and my knees took it, and I was standing.
Air moved against the side of my face.
> **[Floor One.]**
I raised my eyes.
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