Chương 60: “Howl You Like Your Medicine?”

The girl on the pillow tilted her head, her cheek still pressed against the fabric. Her eyes drifted upward, as if reading something Celestia couldn't see.

"Oh, uh. Hmm." She paused.

"Let me check your privileges first." A few seconds passed. The girl's half-lidded eyes moved back and forth, scanning whatever invisible information was in front of her. Then she smiled, though her mouth still didn't move even with her voice booming outward.

"Looks like I'm allowed to tell you! You can say I'm one of the Tower's administrators, so to speak!"

'Privileges. Administrators.' Two words that had never appeared anywhere in the original novel. Arthur had climbed this Tower floor by floor, fought bosses, earned skills, and at no point had he ever mentioned meeting an administrator. If this kind of encounter existed, the author had either deliberately left it out or it was another one of the many inconsistencies that were adding up… Neither possibility was comforting.

"You look like you're still wondering quite a bit of things in your head," the girl said. She shifted on her pillow, rolling slightly onto her side and propping her head up with one hand. Celestia glared at her.

"Oooh! How scary!" The voice didn't sound scared at all.

"You're a feisty one, huh?"

"What do you want from me?" Celestia asked. The girl blinked slowly. For a moment, the lazy expression on her face seemed genuine, as though the question had bored her.

"Hmm? Oh, nothing much." She yawned, though the sound came a half-second after her mouth opened, like poorly synced audio.

"It's standard procedure. One of us meets a candidate who manages to reach Floor 10, partly to announce our existence to you. I'm also here to inform you that you'll receive a bit more support from the Tower from here on out!" Celestia lowered her spear.

"Support. On what ends?"

"Well, once you reach the higher floors, you'll unlock more and more privileges." The girl waved a hand vaguely.

"But until then, everything's basically hush-hush! Can't spoil the fun, you know?"

"Is that all?" The girl didn't answer immediately. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the white ceiling, her arms spread across the pillow. Celestia watched her, her mind running through what she'd just heard. There were more factors now, and none of it had existed in the story she'd read.

"Hmmm…" The girl on the pillow stretched, arching her back before settling comfortably in her large pillow again.

"It's been so long since I've been able to meet a candidate." She sounded wistful, though her face remained the same lazy half-smile it had been since she appeared.

"Ah! Right, yes. Do you have any questions?" Celestia considered. The girl, or whatever she actually was, had offered information freely but within limits. From what she'd gathered, and from what she remembered of other stories involving towers and systems, privileges were unlocked incrementally. The higher you climbed, the more you gained access to. She'd figure out the specifics as she progressed. What mattered right now was something more fundamental.

"What are the requirements to be chosen as a candidate?" Celestia asked. The girl's eyes lit up. She sat upright on the pillow for the first time since appearing, her white hair falling loosely around her shoulders.

"Oh! That's an easy one!" Her voice was bright.

"You just need to have multiple ████." Celestia stared at her.

"I didn't hear that last word," Celestia said.

"Speak clearly." The girl tilted her head, then let out a small laugh with her mouth closed.

"Ah! You're not allowed to know that yet. Silly me!" She tapped her own forehead with a finger, as if scolding herself for the mistake. Celestia's jaw tightened.

"You said it was an easy question."

"It is! The answer is simple. You're just not allowed to hear it yet." The girl flopped back onto the pillow, resuming her horizontal position as if the conversation had exhausted her.

"I forgot when but once you climb up the floors, you'll be able to understand." Was there actually anything useful this woman could tell her? Celestia looked at the girl lying on the pillow. The conversation had produced two pieces of concrete information: that Tower administrators existed, and that Celestia was a candidate. Everything else had been either vague or censored. If she was going to get anything practical out of this encounter, she needed to ask the right question.

"What are my current benefits?" Celestia asked. The girl opened her mouth. Then she stopped. Her eyes drifted upward again, and her expression shifted into something that might have been embarrassment, though it was hard to tell on a face that barely moved.

"Ah! I forgot!" she said.

"You can only ask one question for now. You already used it earlier when you asked about the candidate requirements!" Celestia stared at her.

"So you'll have to wait until one of us meets you again to ask more! Sorry about that!"

'You couldn't have started with that?' Celestia exhaled slowly through her nose. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Tee-hee!" The girl knocked on her own head with her knuckles, a gesture so deliberately cute that it would have earned a fan to the face if she'd been within arm's reach.

"Well, I should let you continue your trials now!" And with that, just as she was about to go back to sleep, she quickly talked again almost forgetting something important.

"Ah, but do remember!" Her tone shifted into something more serious despite its bright and casual intonation.

"Until you reach a certain privilege, it's a huge no-no to talk about our existence to other climbers. Your head'll pop if you try to, even when you're outside the Tower! Just so you know!" Celestia looked back at her. The girl was smiling on the pillow, her eyes half-closed, her posture completely relaxed.

'Erratic. Spontaneous. And completely incongruent.' The woman had just told her that her head would explode if she talked. The ground beneath her was packed earth, dry and firm. Trees surrounded her on three sides, tall and thick-trunked, their canopies filtering the daylight into uneven patches. Grass grew in clumps between exposed roots and loose stones. The terrain sloped upward ahead of her and she could see the tops of more trees stretching out below to her right.

Celestia looked around her in every direction, and sighed. A translucent window appeared in front of her. Floor 10: Trials. Congratulations on reaching this milestone. You have proven your capability by ascending through the first nine floors of the Tower. For the next seven days, you are bound to the premises of your designated mountain zone. Departure before the trial ends is physically prohibited. During this time, you may issue trials upon yourself by relaying your intentions.

The Tower will acknowledge valid trials and track your progress accordingly. Rewards will be distributed throughout or at the end of the trial. The nature and difficulty of your self-imposed trials will directly influence the quality of your rewards. The Tower does not set a minimum standard; you are free to choose trials of any scope. Physical harm between climbers within the same zone is strictly prohibited. We look forward to your endeavors and wish for your success.

The floor's trial was consistent with what she already knew. Climbers set their own challenges, and the Tower rewarded them based on difficulty and completion. The rules were laid out plainly, which was a refreshing change from the conversation she'd just had. The Tower didn't set a minimum standard. A climber could give themselves a trial extremely simple that the Tower would still accept it. They'd pass Floor 10, receive a modest reward, and move on. But that was the catch.

Floor 10's accelerated growth period lasted seven days. Seven days where every trial completed produced results far beyond what the same effort would yield outside the Tower. Wasting that window on easy trials meant throwing away the single best opportunity for development that the early floors offered. This was why Floor 10 was known metaphorically to be more like a staircase rather than a wall. Anyone could walk up it. The question was how many steps you were willing to take.

Celestia's top priority now was to awaken her aura. The exact conditions varied by person, but the common thread was usually extreme exertion. But first, she needed a base camp. Somewhere sheltered, with a clear line of sight in at least one direction. After all, sabotage didn't break the Floor's rules. * With how much she'd prepared beforehand, setting up took less than two hours. Celestia found a cave quite quickly; it was shallow, barely ten meters deep, carved into the base of a rock face halfway up the slope.

Nothing had used it recently, the floor was dry dirt, clean of tracks and droppings, and the ceiling was high enough to stand in at the entrance before tapering down toward the back. She cleared the interior of loose rocks and debris, laid out her bedroll near the back wall, and set up her cooking supplies against the left side. Though her bag-of-holding held enough food and water for well beyond the seven-day trial period, it was for emergencies. Her main food priority was hunting and foraging. Next, the entrance.

She gathered shrubs and cut branches from the surrounding treeline and layered them across the opening, weaving them into the existing vegetation until the cave mouth looked like part of the slope. From inside, she could still peer through the gaps between the greenery and see the outside during daylight. By mid-morning, the camp was done. Her daily planned structure was simple, mornings and early afternoons were for hunting and food preparation. Late afternoons and evenings were for training and meditation.

She would issue standard trials to the Tower as she went. But there was one thing that the people of this world hadn't figured out yet. It was only discovered much later in the novel's timeline, when a character had stumbled onto the optimal method for development on this floor. A method that even Arthur had never used. The Tower didn't just accept trials of action. It also accepted trials of impairment.

A climber could voluntarily impose limitations on themselves for the duration of the floor, and the Tower would enforce them. The worse the impairment, the more it amplified the rewards. The character who had discovered this in the original novel had impaired her vision for the full week. She'd spent seven days blind on a mountainside, completing her trials by sound and touch alone. By the time she left Floor 10, her capabilities had jumped by a margin that no other climber in the story had matched at that stage.

Celestia had spent a long time before entering this Floor thinking about which senses would allow her to grow without making survival impossible.

"Tower," she said.

"Until I finish this floor, impair my sense of taste, my sleep, and my sense of direction." There wasn't any obvious change. She looked around the camp and everything seemed the same. The cave, the greenery covering the entrance, the slope outside. She reached into her supplies and pulled out a strip of dried jerky. She bit into it.

"Blurgh—!" The texture was the first thing she noticed. What should have been firm, salted meat felt like wet sludge against her tongue. Then the taste came. It was so foul that her stomach rejected it before she could even try to swallow. She spat the jerky out and doubled over. Her stomach heaved multiple times before she started vomiting onto the cave floor. The taste didn't leave her mouth. It sat on her tongue and coated the inside of her cheeks, and each retch only seemed to make it stronger.

She hurled again. And again. By the time her stomach had nothing left to give, she was on her hands and knees, breathing hard, her eyes watering.

'That's… significantly worse than I expected.' A part of her already felt like she regretted this. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat back against the cave wall. The taste was still there, and the memory of the texture made her stomach clench when she thought about eating again. But she would have to eat. Every day, multiple times a day, for the next seven days. Combat trials, endurance training, and hunting all required energy, and energy required food.

She'd have to force it down regardless of what it tasted like, and she'd have to keep it down long enough for her body to process it. The sleep impairment, she could already guess. Nightmares, those that jolted you awake with your heart slamming against your ribs, drenched in sweat, unable to fall back asleep for hours. Seven days of that meant seven days of accumulated fatigue on top of everything else. The sense of direction was the mildest of the three, and she'd chosen it deliberately.

She didn't plan to leave the immediate vicinity of her base camp. Her hunting grounds, her training area, and her cave were all within a small enough radius that she could navigate by landmarks and memory rather than by any internal compass. If the impairment scrambled her spatial awareness, it would be an inconvenience at the camp's scale rather than a death sentence. Celestia pushed herself to her feet. She rinsed her mouth with water from one of the sealed containers and spat it out near the cave entrance.

The taste lingered, but it was manageable now. She picked up her spear and walked outside of the cave. It was time to close the gap between her and the main cast.