Edwin Redglaive was an ambitious man.
He was born as a commoner in the capital, someone lucky enough to avoid being kicked down to the slums of the lesser cities. His mother, father, and siblings were kind to him and cherished all the time they spent with one another.
Lumbering paid the bills. The Redglaive Lumbering Crew was a family business, and their work was respected even among nobles. The clientele commended their efforts and spread words about their labors, drawing in more money.
Eventually, the family business was no longer just a commoner's business. Their status hadn't changed, but their wealth was not inferior to that of a lesser noble family.
Certainly not the crumbling House of the Phoenix. As rumors had it, their riches this year were plummeting. In fact, their positive relationship with Priestess Rosaria was all but outright ignored. Slowly, the world was changing, and the noble house was unable to keep up with the pace.
Neither could the Redglaives.
As more people clear towers, the demand for lumberers becomes less of a necessity. There's been an inconsistency in the world's innovation ever since more people began getting unique Rewards from their trips into towers.
No matter how vouched, the Redglaive Lumbering Crew didn't have nearly enough demand to stay afloat.
Soon, they found themselves struggling and running out of options. They'd never been raised to the position of nobility, so the decline of a business was not something anyone in the capital blinked an eye at. Business crumbled weekly under the ever-changing nation's banner.
It was either bravery or stupidity that led the young man to willingly enter a tower for his family.
Edwin was dissuaded by his family. Neither his father, mother, nor siblings wished for him to challenge a tower, let alone the one he sought to enter. It was too dangerous, more dangerous than any other tower.
Information about towers was ample in the capital. Average towers reward its climbers every 5 floors, since it's not rare for him to have a hundred floors. Plus, he knew that all he needed to do was reach the 2nd Floor and then leave to be awarded with something worth his time… if luck was on his side, that is.
No, luck would be on his side. He was confident of that. He'd challenge and brave the tower, and then exit as soon as he could. As long as he is given a good Reward, it'll be worth it. No penalty could be that bad. Depending on his Reward's viability, he might even get the opportunity to become a Reserve Knight.
In the capital, climbers rarely had severe drawbacks. However, Edwin didn't know this was because of a high rate of fatality, rather than a reasonable distribution of punishment.
The turnout at Aciago Tower wasn't nearly as noteworthy as the boy thought it'd be.
An impressive batch entered the tower yesterday, so many of the people who were interested in climbing had already gone. Knights from the capital were deployed into the tower. Their objective was consistent for many years: steadily breach through the persistent standstill of the 5th Floor. Information about the 5th Floor was scarce—practically inexistent.
Citizens of the capital knew that the 5th Floor was reached only thanks to the information shared by the Climbers that forfeited on the 4th Floor.
The Golden Shanks also made an appearance, entering the tower in the same batch. Edwin didn't doubt in his mind that they'd achieve great renown during their climb, with quitters returning to tell tales of their exploits. Their work as mercenaries was superb. Once, the capital employed the Golden Shanks to strike a camp of a thousand men, and found no life in it after just three days. No one knew how they accomplished it, but there were a few confirmed Tower Clearers in their ranks.
With the available information in the capital, Edwin learned about the reputed Climbers who'd reached the 4th Floor.
Shockingly, many of these names did not belong to a knight or someone sent by the capital. It implied that the kingdom's great warriors either didn't make it high enough or were inferior in their methods to the men and women there. Among some of these names:
Ineffable Chain, an elusive man in a mask whose luck was supreme. Each of his Rewards stacked on top of each other, making him a force to be reckoned with by the standards of the tower.
Olson Petyr, a serial killer sent into the tower in hopes of being slaughtered by its monstrous inhabitants. The tower was not much better at executing him than the knights that found they couldn't execute him because of a Reward he received from a previous tower. When the guillotine dropped on his neck, it shattered, and… Edwin didn't know what else happened. The memories of the onlookers were extremely vague after that day, likely a spell cast by the priestess to protect their minds. His Reward wasn't important now; he wasn't their problem anymore.
Among the many names, one stood out. The most prestigious and confusing of each:
The Climber whose name was White Angel.
It was an epithet, belonging to a woman of no words. She did not speak, supposedly lacking a voice, and had been found in the ruins of the 2nd Floor, idling in a pile of treacherous corpses. No one knew how long the woman had been there for, but the corpses created a crimson mist in the cold fog of the city that made inhabitants believe it was an uninhabitable zone for years.
When she finally began her climb, it was a mighty force. Only Holy Knights could achieve the strength of her climb, but with a single unknown Reward, she cut through hordes of intelligent beasts. They'd attempted to ambush her, ignite fire upon her group, and every other possible outcome. Nothing worked.
Before long, the woman had brought a group of hundreds to the 3rd Floor, then the 4th, and finally, she was last seen going to the 5th.
The strange thing, to Edwin and others, is that her feats are unbelievable. By all accounts, they happened. Everyone who returned told the same story, oftentimes being identical… except that the human mind just could not take it as fact. No matter how much someone thought about her achievements, there was a clear disconnect between the person and her actions.
Being told the story for the first time, instead of White Angel, someone would think a deity was being spoken about. The information simply felt… wrong. Even the knights who saw it in person later said that they doubted they were remembering correctly.
If his luck is high, he'll receive a Reward even more formidable than Ineffable Chain's or White Angel's. Maybe he'd be able to skip right into the undiscovered 6th Floor. If so, he wouldn't mind climbing higher whatsoever.
Edwin collected as many armaments as he could for his entry into the tower. Every source about the First Floor, at least from the recent decades, was all the same. Perilous battles must be overcome until a monster is defeated, which opens a gateway to the next floor. There were no exits.
…Odd. It was strange that in the modern day, no exits to the floor existed.
His family had a connection, but a deep-rooted one, to a man who had long since passed. Their relationship held a detail that was minuscule and unimportant, until it wasn't. That detail was imperative to his climb.
The deceased man told them about the early Climbers and their experiences. The battles they faced, the challenges that came with establishing groups, and the lack of preparation they had as an immature, aspiring batch.
Somewhere in that story, there were talks about a poor nobleman who couldn't handle the climb and left from an exit on the First Floor. Mockingly, he was called lucky. Edwin himself laughed at the tale when his parents told it to him.
The key detail from the story was that on the First Floor, all those years ago, someone had forfeited.
If this information reached the ear of an unfortunate child who entered before Edwin, it'd have been the final piece to a puzzle he was blindly assembling. Sadly, not everyone was graced with an equal reservoir of knowledge.
Only a few dozen people entered the tower the same day as Edwin. With so many cases of climbers never returning, it made sense that few people would take the risk. Their best chance of assuring their own survival was yesterday, when an exceptional force entered.
Only those who had nothing to lose were willing to brave the tower. The commoner still had much to lose, yet knew he'd lose everything if he didn't take a gamble… It was a rational decision in his mind.
So, at the humble age of 17, Edwin Redglaive entered the tower and began his climb.
>>><<<
[Welcome, Climber Edwin Redglaive. Aciago Tower greets you.]
[For reaching Floor 1, you will receive a Reward.]
[Please, accept this Reward and climb as high as you can…]
[...You have received: [Faraway Suitor.] Good luck, Climber Edwin Redglaive.]
>>><<<
'Faraway Suitor…?' It was a Reward that passively drew the affection of living things from a distance.
'...I… I can't turn this off?'
Edwin was in a valley of bones. Here and there, there was some blood and meat to be seen, but otherwise, it looked like he'd arrived in a valley of white. If not for the thick, stern structure of the floor, he would've thought he was in a snowy field. The air was cold enough, a breeze passing through the pink mist he found himself in.
The most surprising part was that the air didn't stink.
Every Climber warned about the same thing, citing the smell of the First Floor to be unreasonably terrible. Reportedly, a few Climbers outright died from how overwhelming the setting was on their senses. These were challenging cases, though.
Nevertheless, it couldn't take away from a fact Edwin quickly understood. His location was, without a doubt, rare.
"Ha…!? Ha-ha-ha! You mean… Not only have I got a rare spawnpoint…! That's not all, I also got a pretty decent Reward!" With it, Edwin could become something like a counsellor, or simply use the sway he had on others to bring them into his family's business. Being alluring to men and women was a great boon.
His climb was off to a tremendous start!
So…
Just as quickly as his climb started, it took a devastating hiatus.
"What is… This… this… this…!?" The young man's sanity slipped away, stripped bare like tender meat on a bone.
Seconds before, he was welcomed by the tower and given a Reward called [Faraway Suitor].
It made him alluring to living things.
His body was hot, steaming lifeblood fleeing from his eyelids as he writhed on the ground. He thought about running away from the pain, but it wasn't possible. Tearing off his own flesh only made enough of a distraction to warrant a swear escaping from his lips.
…[Faraway Suitor] made him alluring to living things.
Edwin made a lethal oversight. [Faraway Suitor] worked on living things, not just humans. This meant he drew the attention of humans, animals, and beasts all the same. Nature was not spared from the effects of his newfound Reward.
The boy could've never expected that within the pink fog he spawned in, there was a possessive, loving wraith.
For 30 long, excruciating minutes, the invisible entity caressed him, embracing him like a lover would their missing partner. But Edwin was not missing, he hadn't even been given time to properly arrive in this world before being thrusted head-first into misery.
His body was being torn apart from the inside…
Each time he inhaled, every breath he took, drew the loving wraith deeper into his body. It wanted a connection with him, to be in possession of everything he was and would ever be. He opened his mouth to speak but only cries of agony could come out.
Words were meaningless to a dead man. But the loving wraith was here to hear his cries, the considerate abomination it was.
Something that was paradoxical to the tower had found its way into the boy's body. His arms moved, but they were not convulsing. He was conscious enough to recognize his limbs were being forced to move like they were on strings.
'I'm… I'm…. D—Dying…?' Through the pain, he came to the conclusion his climb was ending early.
He felt like he was dying, and something was taking over his body. He was being forced to stand, organs rearranged to accommodate space for new things that should not have been there. The needless ones were pushed out of a place he became too numb to sense.
The last thing Edwin Redglaive saw… It was harrowing.
More distressing than his own hopeless situation, the thine Edwin Redglaive saw before his body was completely possessed by the affectionate, possessive wraith was something far beyond the fog, unreachable by all human standards.
'...The… ceiling…?'