Chương 17: Someone

Their eyes and mouths had been oriented toward the watchtower at a specific angle and the pattern had changed the moment I arrived, as if my presence had registered in a way that it should not have. I had not understood it at the time and had moved on because floor one had other priorities. But it had sat in the back of my processing since then, a small inconsistency that I had not resolved. Floor two went by easier than expected, that could also be said for floor four. But floor five…

Floor five had produced five simultaneous primary bodies. In fifty-two thousand runs, that had never happened. Floor five's Titan was a checkpoint guardian, calibrated to the floor's expected difficulty range.

What I had faced was a floor forty engagement at a floor five checkpoint, and the only variable that differed between this run and every other was the class I was running and the specific combination of skills I had ended up with, none of which should have been capable of triggering a difficulty escalation in the tower's architecture. The tower's architecture was not supposed to escalate based on my capability. It was supposed to be fixed.

That was the foundational logic of the checkpoint system, consistent challenge at consistent levels. Something had noticed what I was doing. Something at a level above those, something that had looked at this run and decided the standard configuration was insufficient. I walked and thought about that and did not arrive at a comfortable conclusion. The mage class had been sitting on the selection screen for every run I had ever attempted...

I had assumed that was because the early floor stats were genuinely bad and the investment required to reach the payoff was too steep for most attempts. That was still probably true. But there was a second possibility that I had not considered until this staircase, which was that the mage class triggered something in the tower that other classes did not, and that something had spent the last five floors responding to it with increasing intensity. The '404 errors' on the assassin classification.

The assassin class unlocking through Master of Many Paths at a point when I had not had enough progression in the current run to justify it. The five primaries on floor five. None of those were standard system behaviour.

'Something is paying attention,' I thought. The staircase continued upward, while the white expanse of the in-between space stretched out beside me in the way it always did, vast, perspective-breaking, and enough to give me a headache whenever I looked at it directly. So I kept my eyes on my feet and continued climbing. I completely bypassed Floor Six, as some floors were often considered safe zones along the White Staircase. The next stretch, floor seven through to floor fourteen, was manageable.

Not easy, nothing in this tower was easy, but manageable in the specific sense that I had the pattern knowledge to navigate it without the kind of resource expenditure that floor five had required. The architecture opened up after floor five, wider corridors, more variable enemy placement, but less of the checkpoint-adjacent density that made the first five floors so resource-intensive at low levels.

I would have time to recover, to spend the attribute points sitting in my pool, to run Mana Circulation until my reserve climbed back toward functional. I needed to spend those points carefully. The floor five engagement had confirmed some things about this build that I had suspected and revealed others I had not anticipated. Vitality was the ceiling I kept hitting.

Infinite Reservoir's drawback had taken me to eleven health from a starting point that was already compromised, and if I had not cleared the floor in that single Final Moment commitment the drain would have finished the run regardless of what the enemies did. I needed the health ceiling higher before floor ten, where the engagement density changed. I also needed to understand the assassin pathway.

It had unlocked through Master of Many Paths in a context that I had not fully controlled, and the skills that came with it were things I had extensive experience with in isolation, never combined with mage mechanics and never running on Infinite Reservoir as a mana source. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

What I had done inside the World-Eater with Red Thread of Death and Murderous Art and a dagger the system could not classify had produced results I could not fully account for, and results I could not account for were either an advantage I had not yet mapped or a problem I had not yet identified.

"Mysteries…" I say… Possibly both. I was also aware that the class advancement screen was still waiting. I had cleared floor five and hit level fourteen and the advancement notification had been sitting in my queue since before floor four, and I had not opened it because there had not been a moment where opening it seemed like the better use of my attention. Now I had a staircase and eleven health and zero mana and some time. I pulled the screen up. And saw the tree pathway that resembled a tree.

[Class Advancement Available.] [Current Class: Mage Apprentice.] [Advancement Options: Select one.] [Option 1: Arcanist. Mage tree deepens. Scales heavy on Intelligence and Affinity. Spellfist upgrades to Arcane Fist. Channel Investment upgrades to Sustained Field.] [Option 2: Foolish Sage. A mage who follows the path of Koalemos, the divine fool. They chase impossible ideas, pursue meaningless questions, and stumble upon truths that wiser minds were too afraid to seek. [???] Description:??? [???] Description:??? There it was again that useless option that I had seen back in floor one. This one made me uneasy, not in a fearful sense. But the fact that this specific path or option knew my exact name. I put that aside and looked at another third option which had never been presented to me. [Option 3: Void Conduit. Unlocked via Infinite Reservoir acquisition. Mana ceiling permanently removed. Vitality becomes a secondary mana source.] I read all three twice. The third option was not a standard tree branch. It had appeared because I had acquired Infinite Reservoir in the specific circumstances I had acquired it in, inside a creature, with Final Moment active and the dagger producing 404 errors, and the system had apparently decided that warranted a new option that it was labelling irreversible. It reminds me of another pathway under the warrior branch. The samurai that one really seemed like something that had no benefits and a useless class under such powerful and useful group. But it proved to be immensely powerful. I pushed the gate open and walked through, and the floor received me the same way it always had, with complete indifference to what I had survived to get there. That indifference, right now, felt almost comfortable. Almost. The seventh floor opened into purple grass that ran in every direction far enough that the treeline at its edges blurred into a dark mass I could not resolve at this distance. The trees themselves were tall, dark-trunked, with canopies that filtered the floor's ambient light into something cooler and more diffuse than the harsh exposure of the floors below. Small insects moved through the grass at ankle height, their abdomens lit with a deep orange glow, steady rather than erratic, more like ember than spark. The air smelled of something between damp soil and crushed vegetation, clean in a way that none of the previous floors had managed, and I stood in it for a moment and simply breathed. Then my left side informed me that standing still and breathing was not free. I checked the display. [RESOURCES] [Health: 10 / 310] [Mana: 14 / 300] [Stamina: 19 / 100] My passive Mana Circulation had recovered fourteen points during the gate transit. Stamina had climbed marginally from the staircase walk. Health was eleven, which was where it had been, and was going to stay at eleven until I found something to change it, because this build had no passive health regeneration and I had spent my potions inside a worm. I started walking. At the speed my body was willing to cooperate with, which was somewhere between a deliberate walk and a limp, and closer to the limp. The floor six checkpoint was something I had reached in enough previous run. It sat roughly four hundred meters from the entry gate, in a natural clearing where the purple grass thinned and the firefly insects gathered in higher density above the open space, their combined glow giving the clearing a warmth the surrounding forest did not have. I always saw them before I reached the figure. I remember them. Humanoid and seated. Upright in the specific way that suggested they had been in that position for a long time. There was a small structure beside them, more organised than the surrounding environment. That was how I always spotted the trader before anything else. The arrangement of things around them was deliberate, with objects placed in an order that the floor's natural chaos could never produce on its own. I had known this person across more loops than I could accurately count. Under other terms, as humans would put it, they might as well have been family. Though family was something humans usually associated with profound feelings of love. That was a feeling I was not familiar with. Besides, I felt nothing towards this person. Known was perhaps too strong of a word. I had transacted with them. I had stood before them and exchanged the currency the system generated from cleared floors for items the system listed as available. The trader never initiated conversation. They never asked about the floors below or acknowledged that I had been here before. They should not have been able to know that. Still, I had always suspected they did. Their responses carried a strange quality of waiting. They often seemed to anticipate what I was going to say before I said it. Every time I saw them, it was the same. The same indifferent conclusion.