Chương 61: “Life is Ruff”

Paimon couldn't see. The impairment had taken hold the moment she'd spoken the words. For the first few hours, she'd sat with her back pressed against a tree. Sounds she would have normally ignored with her eyes open, had now kept making her flinch. By the end of the first hour, she finally managed to relax. By the second hour, she noticed that the tree she was leaning against gave off mana. She could feel it running through the roots beneath the soil and up through the bark under her palms.

By the third hour, she could feel the mana in the grass, in the insects crawling through it, and aura in the larger animals moving between the trees further up the slope. The ambient mana in the air was faint, but she could pick out where it was thicker and where it thinned, enough to tell what was around her and roughly where. She stood up and started walking. Her mistress had told her to impair her vision. At the time, Paimon hadn't questioned it. And just like every other time, it had been the right call.

In the original story, it was Paimon who had stumbled onto the impairment method during her own climb through the Tower. Alone and without guidance, she had chosen to blind herself on Floor 10 out of desperation rather than strategy. Her growth after that week had outpaced climbers who'd spent months on higher floors.

But this Paimon had Lady Celestia's instructions, weeks of training under Sir Jade, proper equipment, and the experimental space bag that Lady Celestia had procured for her, a prototype from one of the Reingarde-funded workshops, smaller and less refined than the standard bag-of-holding, but functional enough to carry a week's worth of supplies and tools.

By the second day, Paimon had established a camp in a shallow depression between two rock formations, covered the opening with cut branches, and set up a perimeter. The voice came from one of the pits she had made on the second day, roughly forty meters from her camp. Paimon had been preparing her morning meal, dried meat and a handful of nuts she'd foraged, when the sound reached her. She set down the food, picked up her makeshift spear, and made her way over. She didn't need eyes to know what had happened.

It was clear that they'd stolen something from her while she was out foraging and had fallen into one of her traps on the way out. Paimon stopped at the edge of the pit. Below, she could sense the aura of one person, but the stench of iron, of blood, reached her from where she stood.

"P-please," the man said again. His voice was strained.

"I'll give it all back. Everything. Just get me out of here." Paimon stood there. She wanted to say something.

'Should've thought about that before you tried stealing my supplies.' That was the obvious response, but the words didn't come out. It seemed that she had a bit of a problem where she was unable to properly speak to people outside of the office. She lowered herself over the edge and climbed down. She used the roots jutting out from the sides to find her grip. The smell got worse the further she went. The man was below her and to the right. His aura was fading, and his breathing came in short, ragged breaths.

He must have heard her climbing down, because his voice picked up again.

"Oh, thank— thank you, please, I can't feel my—" Paimon ignored him. She reached down toward the bottom of the pit, feeling along the ground with one hand while keeping the other on the wall. Her fingers found a small bag, and she pulled it up and slung it over her shoulder. Thinking it was too little, she searched around the area a bit more, and she finally found it, it was pressed against something solid. She grabbed it, but the solid thing the bag was attached to didn't move. Paimon paused.

She ran her hand across the surface. She felt cloth, and something cold… skin? But… there was no aura at all… It was a second person. She hadn't sensed him because there was nothing left to sense. He'd hit the stakes first and had already died. She pulled the bag, working it loose, and finally managed to take it. After which, she started climbing back up.

"Wait— wait, you can't just— please!" The man's voice pleaded behind her. But Paimon didn't care. Below her, the man kept talking, his words breaking apart into something between begging and sobbing. She reached the top and rolled onto flat ground. She lay there for a moment, breathing hard, and then she got up, gathered her supplies, and carried them back to camp.

Once she was sure that everything was back in place, Paimon went back to the trap and dragged several of the larger branches she'd cut for camouflage and laid them across the top of the pit, one after another, until the opening was covered. She packed leaves and loose dirt over the branches until the ground looked undisturbed. Technically, she hadn't broken any rules. The Tower prohibited physical harm between climbers, but the fall and the stakes had done the harming, not Paimon.

It was a loophole her mistress had explained to her before they'd entered the floor, a sort-of safeguard so that Paimon could protect herself without worrying about the trial. She returned to camp and sat down with her unfinished meal. It was her third day on the mountain. She wondered what her mistress was doing right now. * By the third day, Celestia's body had started to give. Her arms shook when she pushed herself upright. Her legs felt heavy, and each step took much-needed effort to balance herself properly.

Three days of barely eating and almost no sleep had left her fingers fumbling every time she tried to grip her spear. Sleep had turned out to be worse than she'd expected. She'd braced for nightmares, images she could grit her teeth through and forget by morning. What the impairment actually did was worse. A crawling feeling of dread hit the moment her consciousness started to fade, and then something in the back of her skull would screech. A loud screeching, tearing through her ears from the inside.

She'd jolt awake every time. Heart slamming against her ribs, hands grabbing for her spear before she was fully conscious. And then silence. She'd tried again. And again. Each time, the dread arrived just a few seconds after she was actually about to achieve a semblance of sleep, and it never allowed her to actually cross that blissful moment. Three days of this had left her with nothing more than shallow minutes of half-consciousness between attempts, and even those left her feeling worse than before.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. As for food, she'd adapted. Slightly. She could now nibble into the dried jerky, chew through the texture, and force the meat down her throat without her stomach rejecting it immediately. The taste was still foul, and the act of swallowing still made her gag, but she managed by eating in small portions throughout the day, just enough to keep moving. Now, it was the middle of the night. The third night.

Celestia sat with her back against the cave wall, her spear across her lap. The forest outside the camouflaged entrance was quiet. She could hear insects, the occasional call of something further up the slope. But since she knew she couldn't sleep, she no longer even tried.

'Why am I doing this?' The thought had been circling for hours, and she'd been ignoring it, but the fatigue had worn through her patience. She needed an answer. She could have taken the easy path. She had the money. She had the connections. She could hire climbers and adventurers to do the Tower's work for her, the same way she'd hired a party to clear Floors 6 through 9. She could sit in Summit, manage her resources, and let other people bleed on her behalf. Plenty of wealthy nobles did exactly that.

'And then what?' Then she'd be exactly what she'd been in her previous life. Someone who bought results instead of earning them. She'd already lived that way once, and it had only left her feeling shallow and empty. She wanted more from this life.

'What I want is to be capable enough to hold everything together.' The future arcs of the story were coming. She knew what was ahead: the political upheavals, the secrets buried inside the Empire's upper ranks, the threats that no amount of hired swords could handle. Money could buy loyalty up to a point. Past that point, people did what served them. She'd seen it enough times in her previous life.

'People betray you when the cost of loyalty outweighs the benefit.' This was why she'd built every relationship in this world on transaction. Paimon served because Celestia had given her a life worth protecting. Martha stayed because of her family's arrangement, respect and purpose in exchange for loyalty and labor. Even Sir Ozy's bond operated the same way. All of it was based on give-and-take.

'There is no such thing as a true selfless person.' People acted in their own interest. The ones who claimed otherwise were either lying or too stupid to see the transaction underneath. Celestia pulled her knees closer to her chest and rested her forehead against them. The spear rolled off her lap and clattered against the stone floor. The fatigue was getting to her. Her thoughts kept returning to the same places, chewing on the same questions without reaching any answers.

Her body wanted to shut down, and her mind wouldn't let it. She stayed like that for a while. Then she lifted her head, picked up the spear, and stood. Before she knew it, it was already morning...... After another two days passed, things had gotten a lot worse. Celestia was lying on her back in the cave, staring at the ceiling. The rock above her was dark and featureless, but shapes kept forming in it. Cracks that looked like faces. Shadows that moved when they shouldn't have.

Even when she blinked, the shapes felt weird.

'That's new.' She turned her head to the side, and there was a woman sitting cross-legged on the cave floor beside her. Her black hair reached her waist, and her nails were polished in a clean, expensive blue. Brown eyes looked down at Celestia with an expression she recognized immediately, because she'd worn it herself for over two decades. It was herself. The woman leaned forward, resting her chin on her palm.

"Are you that much of a simpleton?" she said.

"You do know that we wouldn't have even tried to experience something like this. There were plenty of ways to go about this Floor." Celestia chuckled. The sound came out dry and cracked from her throat.

"Oh, you think it's funny?" the woman said, tilting her head.

"Of course." Celestia's voice was barely above a whisper. Her lips were dry, and talking made them sting.

"This was what both of us wanted. Our life was dull and pointless. We only lived to spite the people around us." She paused to swallow.

"But here? We can finally live for ourselves." The woman stared at her for a moment. Then she let out a short, sharp laugh.

"Hah! That's laughable coming from you." She held up a hand and started counting off fingers.

"Starting that food program in the Dukedom. Preparing Paimon a life to live ahead of her. Giving slaves a chance to free themselves. Being too generous with Anna." She dropped her hand.

"Isn't that sooooo charitable from you? Living for yourself? That sounds like a fairytale wish come true." Celestia looked at her past life, and the cracks were still there.

"You're right," she said.

"Aren't we such hypocrites?" They looked at each other. And they laughed. It hurt. Celestia's ribs ached and her stomach clenched with each breath, but she laughed anyway. The woman across from her laughed too, and it sounded exactly like hers.

"Taking a good long look at our life," the woman said, once the laughter had faded, "it was such a shithole, wasn't it?"

"Yes," Celestia said.

"It was." The woman looked at her. The brown eyes were clear and steady. Then the woman smiled.

"Hey, me."

"Yes?"

"Knock this out of the ballpark, would you?" Celestia opened her mouth to respond, but the woman was already gone. The space where she'd been sitting was empty cave floor, damp stone and packed dirt. She lay there for a while, looking at the spot where her past self had been. Her breathing was steady. Her ribs still ached from laughing. When she finally turned her head toward the cave entrance, light was coming through the gaps. The morning sky was visible through the branches and leaves, beautiful and fleeting.

It was the rise of the sixth day. Celestia sat up, and her body protested, but she made it upright. She stretched, arms above her head, and felt her shoulders pop twice. She'd gotten no more sleep than the previous nights. Her body was in the same state it had been when she'd lain down. But the questions from the third night had stopped repeating, and her head felt clearer than it had in days. She picked up her spear and walked to the middle of the cave.

'Might as well go all the way.'

"Tower," she said. Life had always been kind to her. Wasn't it time to give her dues? As they say, the greater the struggle, the more glorious the triumph.

"Until the end of my time on this Floor, impair my sense of touch and my sight." Her vision went dark, and then the pain hit. The morning breeze scraped across her exposed skin. What had been cool and gentle a moment before now cut along her arms and face. The spear shaft in her hand burned against her palms, and the packed dirt beneath her bare feet sent jolts up through her soles with every shift of weight. Celestia's jaw clenched.

Her grip tightened on the spear, and the pressure of her own fingers sent a fresh wave of pain through her hands. Every nerve was telling her to drop the weapon and stop touching things. But she knew it was all in her mind. She adjusted her stance, widened her feet, and thrust the spear forward. The motion sent pain through her shoulder and down her arm, and the impact of the thrust jarring to a stop made her teeth rattle. She pulled the spear back and swung it in a horizontal arc.

The friction of the shaft rotating against her palms was enough to make her hiss through her teeth. She reset her stance. The dirt shifted beneath her feet, and each grain felt like ants biting against her skin. She swung again. And again. Celestia continued swinging.