Chương 21: Progress to be made

The white staircase between floors eight and nine had no enemies in it and no time pressure, which meant I had nothing to do except climb and think, and my mind, running at one hundred and four Intelligence with a full mana reserve and the penalty finally lifted, had a great deal to say. I let it. The inverted spire was not a natural structure. I had understood that since approximately run four hundred, when I had stopped treating it as an environment to navigate and started treating it as an object to understand.

Natural structures did not have checkpoint systems. They did not generate floor currency or announce level progressions or produce class selection screens. Whatever had built this place had built it with intention, and the intention was visible in every floor's architecture if you looked at it as design rather than obstacle. What I had been thinking about since the church on floor eight was what the design was for. The lower floors preserved things. Floor three had the archive.

Floor eight had a church, a building humans had constructed to hold their beliefs and their rituals and the objects that mattered to them. The stuffed animal on the bench had not been placed there by the tower's generation system. I was increasingly certain of that. It had been placed there by something that understood what a stuffed animal meant to the humans who had made them, and had left it in a space those humans would have considered significant. The inverted spire was not just a tower. It was a record.

The fragments of civilisation I had been moving through since floor one, the military formation on floor two, the archive on floor three, the gothic architecture of floors seven and eight, these were not atmospheric decoration. They were preserved instances of something that had existed before the tower, something that the tower had been built around or built to contain or built to remember. The humans in the upper floors were not anomalies in an otherwise monster-populated structure.

They were the continuation of whatever the lower floors were preserving in architectural form. And they climbed down. That was the detail that had sat in my processing since I had first encountered them, somewhere around floor thirty on a run that had lasted long enough to reach that level. Every other entity in this tower, every ghoul and golem and arachnid and Titan, existed on a fixed floor and did not move between them. The humans moved.

They moved downward, which was the direction I was not going, and they moved with the specific purposefulness of something that had a destination rather than a territory. What bothered me was the fact that, when I was climbing up, they went down. What was there down the tower? I had only woken up in a grey grass field, or a grey forest. I didn't know if there was anything there, or if there was anything hinting at the fact that there were valuables down there.

If anything, Lady Livia told me to reach the very top of the tower to gain access to what apparently seemed to be all he ever desires, that I could wish for. If anything, I didn't know if I had any desires or anything at all. I never wanted anything other than to climb up and defeat my adversaries. If anything, was I worthy to want anything at all if I wasn't human? I wasn't supposed to be a human after all. Only human wanted objects and objectives. I wasn't a monster, nor did I consider myself a monster.

I didn't know what Devas were. I had very little input on what exactly they were, but the terminology of Deva was meant to be something like a demon, if I could connect the same dots as I did when finding the words Pathfinder or Master of Many Paths, titles that I found out through word terminology, then the system or whatever behind it thought of me as a demon and nothing else. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

If I was a demon, then demons desired things. In the scriptures of humanity, in the archives of the lower floor, demons were depicted as people of heavy desires towards mankind, of ill desires meant only as harm towards them, fulfilling desires built upon their suffering. I had no such desires... Or did I? I had to reason with myself. Fifty-two thousand iterations of pure suffering and pain. Why shouldn't anyone feel that? Why am I forced to go through all of this?

If those self-fulfilling humans claimed that they were so great, then what was to say that my desire to see them suffer through the same level of my fifty-two thousand iterations wasn't a justification that was [perfectly reasonable? Why couldn't they? I think I would enjoy it so much... I try to divert my mind towards another thing, in front of me now, thinking calmly. I had never found a text that explained what a Devas was, the secondary archive I was heading toward had not yielded anything on previous runs, but those runs had been at Intelligence levels that would not have unlocked everything available in the stacks. The gate to floor nine appeared at the top of the staircase and I pressed my palm to it. It opened into a chamber, a single large interior space with a ceiling high enough that the upper sections were not fully visible in the ambient light, and windows along both walls that were not windows in the functional sense, they were coloured glass assembled into images, figures and scenes depicted in deep reds and golds and blues that caught whatever light source the floor was running and threw it across the stone floor in fragmented colour. The figures in the glass were robed. Women in long garments carrying something on their shoulders, a covered structure borne between them, and on the opposite wall a procession of figures in white hoods standing in a line with their heads inclined toward something outside the window's frame. I had seen this imagery before. Not in the tower. In the floor three archive, in the human texts about religious practice and the specific forms it took across different cultural groups. Processional imagery. Ritual movement. The humans depicted in the glass were engaged in something they considered sacred. The chamber smelled of cold stone and something older underneath it, not dust, something that had been sealed into the walls themselves, a mineral dryness that had been accumulating since before anything had used this space for whatever it had been used for. I raised the staff. The Pathfinder overlay was running, and it was not showing me empty space. There were signatures throughout the chamber, positioned along the walls and between the rows of seating that the space contained, and they were not golem-type. They were different, lighter in the overlay's reading, more diffuse than the dense concentration of a constructed entity, and they were not moving. They were standing. I counted eight of them at initial scan, all stationary, positioned as if they had been placed deliberately at intervals that corresponded to the chamber's architectural features. One near each window. One at the far end near the raised platform. I did not fire immediately, which was a decision I made in approximately half a second and then reconsidered and then maintained. The signatures were not aggressive. Every aggressive entity I had encountered in this tower had an approach vector, a directional component in their mana structure that indicated movement toward a target. These signatures were static in a way that read as waiting rather than hunting. I lowered the staff by about ten degrees and kept the channel warm.' What are you,' I thought, looking at the nearest one. The overlay gave me a partial answer. The mana structure was not the dense mechanical architecture of a golem or the biological web of an organic enemy. It was more coherent than either, arranged with a precision that suggested something had built it rather than grown it, and the concentration point was not in a combat-relevant location. It was distributed evenly, which was not a pattern I had read in any entity I had engaged with before. I took three steps into the chamber and waited. Nothing moved. I took three more steps and the coloured light from the windows shifted across the floor as something changed in the ambient light source above, and in that shift I saw the nearest figure clearly for the first time. It was a depiction of a figure, rendered in three dimensions, constructed from the same stone as the walls around it, and it was standing in a posture that the archive texts had described as devotional, one hand raised, head slightly inclined, facing the chamber's central aisle. It looked like a statue statue. Eight statues, positioned throughout the chamber in a configuration that the floor's generation system had produced, and which the Pathfinder overlay had read as mana signatures because the stone they were carved from carried a residual charge I had not encountered in this material before. I stood in the middle of the chamber with my staff raised at a set of statues and Mana Circulation running through my body at full output and felt something that I was not going to call embarrassment but was adjacent to it. I lowered the staff completely. The chamber was quiet.