Chương 30: A single Gunshot

"Yes." She looked at me with an expression that had moved past the cataloguing quality into something more direct.

"Those were not system errors. The system does not produce 404 classifications. That notation is not part of its standard output." I held that information and examined it from several angles.

"Then what produced it," I said. She tilted her head again. The card structure she had built at the table, the one that had fallen when the gust had come through, had not been random. I could see it now in the way she organised the orbiting cards as she thought, the same structural impulse, building small ordered things out of available material.

"Something outside the system was reading the dagger," she said.

"The 404 was its notation, not the tower's."

"Something outside the system," I said.

"That can read items inside it."

"Yes."

"And catalogue climbers," I said. She looked at me steadily.

"That is a different category of entity."

"Are you that entity."

"No," she said, and the answer came without the latency that her deflections had carried, which meant it was true or she had prepared it far enough in advance that the preparation was indistinguishable from truth.

"I am something that exists outside of the tower." The gun was still present but she had lowered it enough that the barrel was no longer in contact with my chin. She was holding it at her wrist the way she had carried the revolver when she approached, the weight resting upward, casual in a way that was deliberate rather than relaxed.

"You are going to tell me what it wants," I said. I heard a gunshot. There was no pain. There was no impact. There was a sound and then there was nothing, and then I was somewhere else entirely. I was floating. Not falling. Not the sensation of a death transition, which I knew well enough to distinguish from anything else. This was slower and quieter, a suspension in something that had no temperature and no smell and no directional pull, a space that existed between states rather than within one.

I had experienced something adjacent to it in the deep stages of extended mana depletion, when the system ran out of resource to draw on and the body went somewhere it could not fully describe on return. I could see the tower. Not from inside it. From outside, at a distance and angle that should not have been possible given that I had never been outside the tower in any run I could remember, and the tower from outside was nothing like what the architecture of its floors suggested it should be.

It was ancient in a way that registered as geological rather than architectural, spanning upward and downward beyond any range my perception could resolve, an inverted spire in the most literal sense, both directions simultaneously, its mass extending into a void that had no horizon and no reference points and no light source I could identify, and yet everything was visible with a clarity that felt imposed rather than natural. A pair of hands found my head.

Cool and precise, fingers closing around my jaw from behind and tilting my face upward, the contact gentle but not hesitant, the grip of something that knew exactly how much force was appropriate and applied exactly that much. I looked up.

Livia looked back down at me from above, inverted relative to my position, her green hair falling toward me, her piercing eyes carrying that specific amused expression I had seen form on her face in the seconds before she shot me, and now holding it with the comfort of someone who had been waiting to use it for considerably longer than the conversation had lasted.

"Hello," she said.

"You shot me," I said.

"I did," she agreed, with the tone of someone confirming a scheduling detail.

"In the head," I said.

"In the general direction of your head," she said.

"Tsk, tsk. Relax, you youngster... you are all so dramatic nowadays." Youngsters... had the trader or Livia met other people? Youngsters? I was confused, but I chose not to admit it. I took inventory of this. She was correct. I was intact. The system display was present but showing static interference rather than clean numbers, and when I tried to open the advancement screen it returned an error notation that was not the tower's standard format. Love what you're reading?

Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. It was a 404. I looked at her. She was still holding my face with both hands and had not moved to release it, which I noted and did not comment on because the list of things requiring my attention in the current environment was long and that item was near the bottom of it.

"Where are we," I said.

"Between," she said.

"It is the most accurate word I have for it. The space the tower occupies when it is not actively being a tower."

"Towers are always towers," I said.

"This one is not always anything," she replied.

"That is what makes it interesting." She released my jaw and did something with her hand that adjusted my orientation, and suddenly I was upright relative to her rather than inverted, and the tower was below and around us simultaneously, its ancient geometry spanning in every direction with the same impossible scale I had registered when I first arrived in this space. The floors were visible.

Not as floors exactly, but as distinct strata within the tower's mass, each one carrying a quality I could perceive without being able to fully categorise, a combination of architectural signature and something more essential than architecture, like the residual presence of everything that had ever happened on each level compressed into a single perceptible layer. Like a building block... a landmass...

trees, forest, mountains stacked upon each other, surrounded by breaking blocks of geometrical blobs and cylinders. I could see floor five and the yellow residue of the World-Eater engagement still spreading across it in slow motion and the universal galactic puddle of water. I could see the archive floor and the books I had read, their absorbed content still moving through the layer like light through water.

"The floors," I said.

"Representations," she said, appearing beside me now rather than above, her voice carrying the same measured cadence she had used at the trade table but with something underneath it that the trade table had never permitted.

"Each one is a world. Not a copy. The world itself, or what remains of it, compressed and integrated into the tower's architecture." She paused.

"My associate's words. Abandoned worlds. Worlds that fought. Worlds that ended. Worlds that are still, technically, ongoing, though in a form their original inhabitants would not recognise." I looked at the floor five layer and thought about the World-Eater and the army of hollow soldiers on floor two and the archive full of human texts and the ghouls that had looked toward the watchtower on floor one with their mouths open.

"They were real," I said. Not a question.

"They are real," she said.

"The past tense is a convenience, not an accuracy." The tower below us expanded then, a slow outward movement that I watched with the specific attention I gave to things I could not stop and therefore needed to understand.

It grew outward in a shape that was initially spherical and then resolved into something more complex, its mass encompassing a volume that moved from the scale of a building to the scale of a city to the scale of something I did not have an architectural reference for, and then further, past any terrestrial scale, past anything I could map against experience, until it occupied what I was registering as a solar system and then was still growing. I watched it. Livia watched me watch it.

"My associate built it," she said, after allowing me enough time to establish a baseline understanding of what I was looking at.

"Not quickly. The construction is ongoing. Has been ongoing since before the earliest floor was integrated. Will be ongoing after floors I have not yet seen are added."

"Who is your associate," I said. She was quiet for a moment. Around us, or above us, or in whatever direction, metallic figures moved through what appeared to be an older layer of the tower's history, riding shapes that I identified after a moment as horses, though the horses were constructed rather than biological, their movement too regular to be organic.

Explosions lit the mid-distance, the tower shaking in that layer but stable in the space we occupied, and Livia reached over and put her hand around my wrist and pulled upward, and the layer receded below us.

"They are not someone I can introduce you to," she said.

"They are... beyond this layer of reality..."

"Then what can you tell me," I said. She looked at me with the green eyes and the slight veil and the expression that had been forming since she shot me and had not fully resolved into anything I could name yet.

"You have blood that the system should not be able to produce," she said.

"The Devas classification it assigned you is the closest category it had available. It is not accurate." She held my wrist with a pressure that was not restraining but was deliberate.

"Whatever you are, you are fragile in a way that is specific and significant. Fragile in the way that very particular things are fragile. Things that matter because of what they contain."

"That is not a classification," I said.

"No," she agreed.

"What does it contain," I said, annoyed. She looked away from me and toward the tower below, which was still expanding at the slow pace it had maintained since she first showed it to me, its mass now encompassing something I was reading as a universal-scale volume, the floors within it reduced to the size of individual cells in an organism too large to perceive as a whole.

"The largest responsibility I have ever seen assigned to a single entity," she said quietly.

"And I have seen the tower integrate worlds. I have catalogued what those worlds produced." She turned back to face me.

"None of them produced a living being..." She paused.

"At the bottom of the spire... or should I say the top." I stood in the space between states and looked at her and thought about fifty-two thousand runs and class selections. I had encountered life and death, people, monsters, and realms alike. The further I climbed, I would say, the further I climbed up the more... normal things seemed, the more stable, since I saw fewer monsters... I thought that floor had died; I died to monsters. But I was at my very apex.

I had just run the warrior archetype class and found the Starfall Blade and the Nebula Armour. Nothing could kill me. But the thing I had encountered was not in any conventional way a monster. It had intelligence. I scratched that thought aside.

"They blessed me," I said.

"That is what the title means. The Regressor. It is not a consequence of what I do in the tower. It is something assigned before I entered it." I frowned.

"I appeared... I never entered here, did I? So either there is no I?" I looked up, confused but also sad in a way. Pathetic. Livia did not answer, which was its own answer.

"And you," I said.

"You are not the one who assigned it."

"No," she said.

"I am something that exists adjacent to the tower. My associate and I have an arrangement that is older than most of the floors. I would say it's even older than me." She paused.

"I chose to help you. I want to be precise about that. I was not directed nor assigned. I observed you across centuries of iterations and I made a choice, and the choice was mine."

"Why," I said. She looked at me for three seconds, the processing interval I had learned to recognise.

"Because you have rule two," she said. I said nothing.

"Never lose hope," she continued.

"Regardless of the odds. There is always something that can be done." She tilted her head at the slight angle I had catalogued from the table.

"You said it on the staircase before floor five. You have said versions of it in other runs, in other words. But the content is consistent." She paused.

"In the worlds the tower has integrated, the ones that fought and ended and abandoned, that specific conclusion was not consistent. It was rare. Rarer than the blood apparently." I held that information and did not know what to do with it, which was a state I was not accustomed to.