Veldex's fingernails scraped against crystal—or something like crystal. The Tower of Babylon burned beneath his palms, neither hot nor cold, but alive. Pulsing. His muscles screamed as he dragged himself another impossible inch upward into the white-gold radiance that swallowed the world.
'Keep climbing.'
The words had become a rhythm, a heartbeat, a prayer.
They said the Tower reached the heavens. They said it appeared three generations ago when the first rifts tore open and spilled demons into the wheat fields. When beasts with too many teeth and not enough eyes came hunting. When the sky itself cracked and let the aliens through.
The Tower had been humanity's answer. Their salvation.
'If you climb in faith. If you cling to your desire. If you survive.'
The Tower would grant you a system.
Veldex's throat clicked as he tried to swallow. His tongue sat thick and useless in his mouth, dry as sand, tasting of copper and desperation. His lips cracked when he whispered: "If I don't die—" His voice fractured. "Please. The healing system. Please."
Fourteen years old. That's when your fate crystallized. Climb the Tower, earn your system, enter the elite academies. Become a defender with blades of light and fists that shattered stone. Become a healer, stitching wounds that should kill. Become a scientist, forging weapons in laboratories that hummed with stolen alien technology. Become a cultivator, gathering power from the air itself.
Or become one of the wild ones—the beast-tamers, the monster-bonded—locked behind walls of reinforced steel, only unleashed when the rifts opened and the world needed monsters of its own.
Veldex needed none of that.
He only needed to save his sister.
His heart hammered against his ribs—too fast, too hard—as he reached for another handhold. The Tower's surface rippled beneath his touch like water made solid, like light given form. Holographic, they called it, but that word felt too small. The glow pressed against his closed eyelids, warm and invasive, painting the inside of his skull amber and gold.
He couldn't see the bottom anymore. Couldn't see the top. Only the infinite, luminous present. Only his next breath. His next reach.
"AHHHHHHH!"
The scream tore through the air—raw, animal, terrified.
Then nothing.
Veldex's entire body locked. His fingers white-knuckled against the Tower's surface. His heart stopped—actually stopped—before slamming back to life in a wild, frantic gallop. The sound echoed in his skull long after it died: the doppler wail of a falling body, swallowed by the light below.
He'd heard dozens fall today. Maybe hundreds. The Tower took its price.
'Keep moving.'
He forced his right hand to release. Forced it to reach higher. His bicep trembled with exhaustion, tendons pulled taut as bowstrings.
'Keep moving.'
His sister's face bloomed behind his eyes—pale, too pale, her skin like tissue paper bruised with fever. Eight years old and already translucent. Already slipping away. The sickness ate her from the inside, something the village herbalists couldn't name, couldn't slow. It had a hunger that no medicine could satisfy.
Their parents should have been there. Should have climbed this Tower themselves.
But the demons had come in the autumn—a rift two miles from their village. His father had died with a scythe in his hands, trying to protect the harvest. His mother had died pulling children into the root cellar. Veldex had watched from that root cellar, through the crack in the door, as something with too many joints and eyes like furnaces tore her apart.
He was the man of the house now.
Fourteen years old, and he was all his sister had left.
'The healing system.' Not for glory. Not for the academy. Just enough power to knit her failing body back together. Just enough to let her live.
His left foot slipped.
His stomach dropped. For one terrible, weightless moment, he dangled by his fingertips—the Tower's glow spinning around him, his pulse roaring in his ears louder than any scream.
Then his foot found purchase.
Veldex pressed his forehead against the Tower's surface and gasped—great, shuddering breaths that burned his lungs. His whole body shook. Sweat or tears or both stung his eyes.
"Keep climbing," he whispered into the light. Into the gold. Into the heat of his own desperation.
The Tower glowed on, indifferent.
And Veldex climbed.