Sorin couldn’t help but contrast this moment with his memories of entering the trial grounds for the first time. Though the exact details were fuzzy—forty years was a long time to keep it all locked in his mind, after all—he’d never forgotten that heady mixture of excitement and apprehension. It had been his first real challenge, one he’d secretly trained for using an old broken practice sword he’d found in the trash outside of a prestigious academy for rich people’s kids while he saved up to buy a real sword.

  God help me, am I really about to do this all again? Forty years I’ve been climbing. My whole life was spent on this, and for what? Maybe I reached the end, but I can’t remember it, and if so, my reward is just… a younger body and the opportunity to start over, to live my life differently?

  Then why did I spend my first day preparing to start climbing all over again?

  He knew the reason, though. It was simple, really. He wanted answers, needed them. Something had happened on Floor 100, and he couldn’t be satisfied with not knowing. Besides that, there was also the fact that rank 0s lived miserable lives. Even getting up to rank 10 or 20 would be enough to ensure a comfortable retirement if he decided to go that route.

  The trial grounds were similar to Sorin’s memories, though the architecture had changed to align with the new tower’s red stonework and spike motif. Arches led them in, each one carved with intricate patterns designed to mimic soulprints.

  No, not mimic, he realized, coming to a halt. These are soulprints. How did I not know about this? Maybe the arches in my original tower didn’t have these carvings. I don’t remember them, at least, and it’s not like I would have recognized them as soulprints back at rank 0 anyway.

  “Sorin?” Odric asked. “You alright?”

  “Hmm? Oh, sorry. I just realized these patterns… Well, never mind. It’s not important.”

  Without some medium to consume the soulprint, there was no way to add it to his soulspace, meaning that the patterns carved here were merely interesting. He recognized a few of the patterns, but they were far too large and complicated for his soulspace to hold. Perhaps he’d return to the trial grounds in the future and see if there was anything to be learned.

  The rest of the group stopped to examine the carved archways curiously, but it was obvious none of them had grasped the connection. And why should they? The ones I recognize are all A-ranked soulprints, too complicated for anyone who hasn’t reached at least Floor 50 to mimic. These are just decorations to almost every living person in the tower.

  “What are they?” Rue asked.

  “They’re the patterns soulprints shape anima into,” Sorin said when he saw they’d all grown curious. That spiked their interests, but he shook his head and explained, “You’d need to climb for a decade before your soulspace was big enough to hold one of these patterns, and without a medium, they’re just instructions on how to manually shape anima.”

  “That makes them functionally worthless, but the knowledge itself might be valuable,” Nemari said. “If we could find the right buyer…”

  “I’m sure anyone who cares already knows,” Odric said. “The arches aren’t exactly hidden away.”

  “So you could just take anima and shape it into these patterns,” Rue said, gesturing toward the closest arch, “and use some ability that you don’t have a soulprint for, just like that?”

  “That’s vastly oversimplifying the difficulty of such a task, but yes, it’s theoretically possible that, if you had enough anima and a big enough soulspace to make the pattern, these carvings could serve as a primer.”

  “How about that,” the teenage girl said. “You’d think people would know about this. Maybe not for the big stuff, but for F and E-ranked soulprints at least.”

  “They do,” he told her. “You’ll start seeing the practice more past rank 10. It’s not uncommon for climbers to leave as much as a quarter of their soulspace empty to hard cast a pattern they don’t have a soul print for. There are books full of them called grimoires. The tower itself sometimes gives them to us as loot.”

  “Which is why what’s carved on these pillars is probably already known by everyone who cares,” Odric added. “This kind of stuff isn’t really a secret. It’s just that nobody bothers to explain things to us lowly rank 0s and 1s.”

  Somebody explained at least some of this to you, Sorin thought as he studied Odric. You’ve got some experience, but how much? Is this all just a coincidence, or are you involved in what happened to me?

  Perhaps that thought was too paranoid, but until Sorin figured out what had happened to him on Floor 100, he wasn’t going to just blindly trust anyone. His own mother could come back from the afterlife to explain what had happened to him, and he’d still be suspicious.

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  “We can talk about it later,” Nemari said. “We’ve got a portal guardian to defeat.”

  * * *

  In his first life, the Floor 0 portal guardian had been a black-skinned goblin-shaped thing over six feet tall with the ability to shroud the entire arena in darkness. If his new party was to be believed, this one was a golem armed with a pike that could summon small golems into the fight to help it. Sorin had never seen one of those as a portal guardian, but he’d faced plenty of monsters that followed the same patterns.

  The arena itself was much like he remembered his first one being. It was a simple circle of stone, flat and even, fifty feet across and surrounded by walls twelve feet high. They weren’t impossible to reach the top of with a strong jump, but nobody in this group would be doing it on their own. Odric was the only one with the height, but Sorin doubted he could jump that high.

  On the north side was a simple portcullis gate, closed and, like most tower architecture, indestructible. On the south side was a second portcullis, this one open. They trooped in through that entrance, single file, with Sorin in the lead and Odric bringing up the rear. Nemari and Rue were clustered close together, both of them obviously agitated about something.

  Definitely not the first time for either of them. God, I remember when I used to be able to run away from portal guardians. It’s been, what, sixty floors now? It’s weird to even think that retreat is an option again.

  In the center of the arena was what appeared to be a statue made of ivory, of all things. Finding a monster big enough to have a piece of ivory that could be carved into the likeness of an eight-foot-tall armored man with a pike sized to match would have been nearly impossible, but the tower itself didn’t care about details like that. It often made things that were impossible to replicate.

  “The golem, I assume,” Sorin said. “Where do the smaller monsters come from?”

  “Randomly placed gateways that only open long enough to drop them out before closing again,” Nemari said sourly. “Sometimes literally right on top of your head.”

  “We’ll just have to kill it as quickly as we can,” Sorin said. Though his body couldn’t keep up with his mind, not even close, he was confident that he still had the skills to reduce the golem to a pile of rubble in short order.

  “I’ll go right, you go left,” Rue said.

  “Got it. Everybody ready?”

  After getting nods from Nemari and Odric, Sorin stepped through the portcullis and into the arena. Twenty-five feet of open space separated him from his target. It took him less than a second to cross, but even in that short period of time, the statue came to life and shifted its pike down to meet his charge.

  No novice to enemies trying to skewer him on first contact, Sorin skipped to the side and kept his sword raised between himself and the pike to parry the no doubt razor-sharp tip. The golem tried to adjust the angle to compensate, but he was already past the weapon before it could and bringing his sword down on the pale white hand holding it.

  Ivory cracked, but a single blow from such a low-quality weapon wielded by a man without a single fortifying soulprint couldn’t shear through it. Sorin knew that, and he hadn’t tried. That was merely the first strike in a spot he planned to focus on over the next ten seconds or so as he chipped away at it. Disarming his opponent, literally in this case, was an excellent way to leave it vulnerable to follow up attacks.

  As the fight started in earnest, a smile crept across Sorin’s lips. All of his earlier doubts were forgotten now. This right here, fighting and struggling and overcoming the tower’s challenges, this was what he’d been born to do.

  He picked up speed, his attacks coming harder as the golem struggled to react, and he started weaving ice darts in between strikes.

  * * *

  “God, he’s fast,” Nemari whispered. She was almost afraid to even throw a firebolt into melee, so rapidly was the newest member of their team dancing around the golem. Rue was struggling to maintain a position opposite him, but even then, the portal guardian’s focus was wholly consumed by Sorin, giving her free rein to carve up its enormous body.

  Normally, Nemari would aim for center mass, but with Sorin all over it, she was forced to adjust upward and shoot for its head. Bursts of fire formed and, fueled by the anima streaming from her soul, lashed the golem’s pale white face repeatedly. At first, they seemed to do nothing, but it quickly heated up and started cracking. Small white chunks of ivory fell out, marring its features.

  Not like it matters compared to him. He’s already cut off an arm somehow.

  She didn’t care for melee combat. Slamming a weapon into a shield or another weapon hurt too much for her tastes. Rue insisted that she hardly noticed anymore, but Nemari could see her grimace every time she struck the golem with either sword. Sorin, on the other hand, truly didn’t seem to care about the pain. His attack was so wild that she doubted he felt it at all.

  For a brief moment, Nemari worried that their new ally had completely lost control, that he was nothing more than a savage animal with a sharp metal stick just as happy to attack a friend as a foe. But no, she realized almost instantly that the ice darts flying from seemingly random spots across his body to strike the golem never missed, that somehow, he was always in the perfect position to dodge the golem’s every attempt at a counterattack.

  Sorin was just that good.

  “Watch out for the first reinforcement wave!” Odric called out. He tensed up to rush forward from where he’d been guarding Nemari, unable to contribute to the melee brawl and lacking a ranged option.

  Before a gate could open, a sharp crack filled the air, and Sorin’s scrap-iron sword drove up into the golem’s chest. He clasped the hilt in both hands and pulled hard to the side, jerking the golem off balance and tearing out a huge chunk of ivory to reveal the top half of a scintillating orb. It shimmered with every color in the open air just for an instant, then a sliver of ice slammed into it and the color died, leaving the orb a dark, dead gray.

  The golem toppled over and shattered into a thousand pieces across the arena floor, leaving Rue standing there, arms hanging limp at her sides and her chest heaving from the exertion. Sorin, on the other hand, calmly extracted the scrap of canvas he was using as a sheath from where he’d knotted it around his belt and started rewrapping his sword, as casual as if he’d just finished a cup of tea.

  “What the fuck,” Nemari whispered. The mini-golems didn’t even have time to arrive. Who the hell is this guy?