Will heard Jason’s footsteps, heartbeat and breathing approach. He was excited about something. He was also carrying something composed of dense miasma in his hand.

“Will, check this out!” Jason shouted as he jumped up on top of the rattling wagon

“Whatcha got?” Will asked, glancing over.

“There’s a Myth on this Floor, and I caught it!” Jason said, brandishing what looked like a tear-shaped opaline gemstone about the size of a coin. Will could easily picture it slotting onto a sword, cuirass, belt, or whatever. it was just small and pretty enough to basically fit anywhere without being too out of place.

Will accepted the object and peered at it intently, waiting for The System to provide further detail.

Harbinger Relic Seed.

The condensed myth of the Harbinger, who has seven times brought about the downfall of the Fae. When applied to a Relic, this seed creates an affix that enhances Focus, contract magic and gives bonuses against the fae. Affix starts minor, grows as the myth of the Relic does. Cannot be removed.

“What do you think!?”

“It’s awesome. Priceless even. You could probably name your price if you sold it to the Lord of this Floor.”

“You’re not gonna…use it?” Jason asked, wilting as though Will had attacked him personally.

“I don’t plan on spending a lot of time on this Floor. All the benefits are helpful in one way or another, but I’m reluctant to put that on any of my Set items. I’m not sure how they would react to being modified a second time.

Lord Bakton though, he could use something like this to push the Fae Lords off their entrenched positions and open this Floor up for Climber habitation. It could become the new Akul. He would get much better use out of it, simply because he lives here full-time.” Will said, handing it back.

“One of our jobs as Climbers is to look at the bigger picture and see if there’s a way to drop a ladder down after us so that other Climbers can follow.”

“Hmm…I see.” Jason said, pursing his lips.

“Whatcha thinkin?” Will asked.

“The Eighth Floor is a death trap. This place couldn’t become the new Akul as long as the 8th Floor acts as a barrier. If I went to Akul and started a rumor about someone who cleared the entire undead Floor, I wonder if I could make a series of Relic Seeds that would either allow people to stay on that floor semi-permanently, or clean it up a bit, make it less dangerous.”

“If you could, that would redefine the Tower. Might as well give it a shot when we get to Bakton’s Stronghold.” Will said. “There’s a few thousand people there at any given time. It’s one of the hubs of trade between the extreme floors and the lower floors.”

Nobody wanted to travel through the 8th Floor if they didn’t have to, so some ambitious merchants made fortunes buying ultra-rare Relics and Sacrifices at Bakton’s Stronghold from high level Climbers in exchange for food and supplies, then taking on the risk of transporting the goods down to Akul themselves.

That meant they might be able to get some damn good deals on Relics and Sacrifices on their way through Bakton’s Stronghold.

If the chokepoint of the 8th Floor is opened up, and this becomes the new Akul, that would increase the flow of people to my Stronghold drastically.

The amount of money and manpower it would require to make the passage up to the Ninth Floor safe…Will wasn’t sure it even existed.

It was the random Shuffling of Climbers as they took doors from Floor to Floor that made things unpredictable. Unpredictable meant dangerous.

And the fact that the only travel between Floors is restricted behind Key Site clearing. That’s a major roadblock.

If people could freely travel up and down, like they could in the first 5 Floors, humans could actually get a toehold. It seemed like the design of the Tower was to deliberately filter people out, creating unnatural choke-points.

If anyone could figure out a way to bypass the Key Sites, why not the civilization that had designed the last two floors? That had corrupted the Miasma of the 8th and 9th Floor?

Will tucked the Relic Seed in his Dimensional Storage for safekeeping and let Jason go about his business, seeing him off before climbing down off the wagon and going over to where Reese was.

“Hey Reese,” Will said, approaching the emaciated immortal sailor. The man was starting to actually put on some weight eating the daily rations.

“Eh?” Reese glanced up from where he was giving a demonstration on how to filter clay from mud.

“How come nobody ever made a Relic that can create a Door between Floors and stuck it on top of a Key Site?”

“It’s been attempted, but The Tower makes a quest to destroy it.”

“Why?” Will asked. “It would allow supplies and Climbers to travel up and down in huge quantities.”

“A few reasons.” Reese said, ticking off his fingers.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“Reason number one: The Tower is stupid. It’s not capable of a great deal of adaptive thinking, so it can’t reason that allowing Climbers to block one Key Site to power a portal would be a benefit on average due to an improvement in infrastructure which would allow humans to clear deeper Key Sites that they currently struggle with.

Reason number two: an unregulated, Climber-made Door would probably lack some of the safeguards that the Tower has, which might allow pathogens from Floors like the previous one to spread. Imagine every floor being a barren wasteland filled with undead.

“And reason number three: The amount of technological advancement required to create these Doors require a couple days, at least, which makes it very rare that a society ever figures out how to do it in the first place. The people from the last Floor were close, but they self-destructed before they could pull it off.”

“Coils, I think you mean.” Will said.

“Yeah, that.” Reese said, snapping his fingers.

“…Is there a way to poke holes between Floors?” Will asked, thinking back to the merchant route between the 1st and 5th Floors. Giant holes in the sky.

“Absolutely not,” Reese said, shaking his head vigorously. “Not only is that impossible, Such a thing would be catastrophic.”

“There’s a series of holes between the First and Fifth Floor.” Will said. “Merchant caravans use them.”

“Buuuuh….” Reese’s eyes went wide. “That’s…not…good. When did that happen!?”

“I’unno.” Will shrugged. He didn’t know, but he suspected it was during the last Coil, while Reese was trapped in his coffin.

Which meant the last guy who oversaw the end of the Coil had probably been involved.

Ezykial the serpent.

Will made a mental note to research the man’s lore further. If the suggestion about the infected hand was anything to go on, there might be parallels that William could draw from for inspiration.

“The holes in the Floors the only reason that Akul is as big as it is, though, so if we as a species want to push deeper into the Tower, we might have to break some rules,” Will said.

“Assuming it doesn’t kill us all,” Reese replied.

“Yes, assuming that.” Will nodded before saying his goodbyes and returning to the roof of the wagon, studying the beautiful landscape as it slid by.

When he stopped and really looked at it, the traces of design in the all-encompassing forest weren’t hard to spot.

There were babbling brooks with gravel banks where a group of people could relax and cool their heels in the stream or fish, the area flanked by bushes just high enough to grant privacy. This arrangement of features wasn’t unusual in an of itself, but the way the stream zigzagged across the land, creating hundreds of identical picturesque locations…that was deeply suspicious.

The trees were evenly spaced. None of them were competing with each other for space, as though a gardener had carefully measured out the ideal distance.

Every time the caravan broke out of the forest into a meadow, they were struck by the sight of the rolling hills catching the sun’s rays and glittering like jewels, leaves lightly misted by a conveniently placed waterfall.

The first time it happened, everyone gasped with awe. And the second. Every time after that, the gasps were less numerous, and less appreciative as – perhaps subconsciously – the caravan began to understand that the beauty they were beholding was manufactured.

It was still pretty, and Will could see why people would want to settle down here. Even manufactured beauty is beauty.

It just lacks context to make it feel real. Some dead things. An impassible briar patch. A fallen tree destroying one of its own children. An inconvenient boulder. Beetle kill. Diseased burls. Mosquitos.

None of those things existed to lend a sense of reality and consequence, leading to an eerie, disconnected feeling that seeped in through the corner of your eye.

I wonder how the Floor has remained so controlled after eight thousand years? Will thought.

Maybe maintaining the environment as it was originally designed is a part of the Debt system?

Will cocked his head to the side as he followed the train of thought. I wonder if the Fae were originally some kind of maintenance creatures that were bred to interact with a small portion of the Debt system, receive instructions from the Floor itself, subtly pushed to keep everything exactly the same, no matter how many years passed.

The other idea that had been rattling around in Will’s head was that the Fae were the descendants of the aristocrats who had been trapped here when the floor below was overwhelmed by undead.

If dragons can devolve into kobolds by moving to lower Floors, who’s to say the opposite can’t happen to humans?

Will thought to himself.

It was an intriguing question.

Were the Fae spawned from the miasma, little garden gnomes that got loose and gained power, or distant cousins of humans?

When Will approached Reese about that, the man shrugged, stating that he’d never been allowed on the 9th Floor after it had become a haven for the aristocracy. When he knew it, it had been mountainous and full of natural resources, not worn down to rolling hills, meadows and creeks.

By the time he hit the Floor again several coils later, the fae had already established themselves, their origin shrouded in mystery. Likely by choice. The less people knew about their origin, the less leverage they had in negotiations.

I bet the original humans are gone, and these things are just overgrown garden gnomes, Will thought.

When they stopped for the night, Will decided to do some of Loth’s ‘science’.

Loth liked his hypothesis and joined in the experiment. Anna had a blank expression when Will told her about it, but cheerfully provided a rabbit-and-potato stew for them.

Through some creative use of Will’s Abilities and Loth’s insects, they messed up the perfection of the surroundings, rearranging a few trees to be too close to each other, messing up the flow of the river, and creating various other eyesores.

Once they’d set the bait out, Loth and Will hid and waited.

…It didn’t take long.

Once the sun went down, thousands of tiny fae with wings crawled out of the earth, swarming around the egregiously shuffled landscape.

Bigger ones, like the one in the whisky bottle, acted as foremen, coordinating the teams of insect-like fae the size of Will’s thumb, shouting terse commands to their brethren and bitterly shaking their heads.

Will and Loth watched in fascination, nursing their stew from behind the blind as the unsightliness they’d caused was subtly smoothed out, the landscape returning to picturesque perfection.

“You realize this doesn’t prove that they were descended from garden gnomes, only that they are compelled to keep the land.” Loth said as they left.

“You’re not wrong, but this is strong evidence that there may be a link between the curated environment itself and the Debt system.” Will replied.

“True.” Loth mused. “This requires further testing.”

That further begs the question: How does anyone farm on this Floor if the Fae are constantly undoing any work you do on the land?

The answer: Not well.

When they arrived at Bakton’s Stronghold the next afternoon, Will realized that he could count the number of farms around it on both hands.

Eight. Eight anemic farms to feed thousands of people?

The farms were stuck tight to the walls of the Stronghold, growing hardy greens and a few fruit trees to stave off scurvy, while a stream of hunters carried prey over their shoulders from the forests beyond.

Interesting.

It seemed as though wild game was plentiful on the 9th Floor. More than plentiful, it was a staple.

At least it’s not seafood, Will thought, leading the caravan towards the Stronghold. Although I do like shrimp.