The Empire did not move hastily.
That was its strength.
Even as the Tower of Existence shimmered in quiet mystery at the edge of the White Palace's domain, the Empire did not send armies or emissaries. No proclamations were made. No decrees issued. It simply… observed.
But what the world could not see was the movement beneath still waters. A command had gone forth. Silent and sure.
"Send the Ghostleaf Contingent."
They were not known to the world. But Aeon had known — perhaps even anticipated — that something like them would arrive.
Arrival
A ship of silence descended beneath the cloud line — shaped like a crescent of obsidian, its hull covered in Void-inked formations. When it landed in the valley outside the Tower, there was no fanfare. No flags. No banners.
Only five figures stepped out — cloaked, masked, and quiet.
Each was an elite. Each had walked through storms of blood to reach their position. And each had a directive:
Ascend the Tower. Survive. Return.
They did not question the mission. They knew the Tower was the pet project of Aeon, the Sovereign's seventhborn. That alone made it a matter of concern. Not alarm — yet. But concern.
So they moved forward.
First Floor:
The Desert of Endurance
The moment they entered, the world shifted.
Wind roared. Sun blazed. Sand stretched to every horizon.
The First Floor had changed since Aeon's first trial. It was the purest test: a crucible of pain without narrative or comfort. No illusion, no trick, no explanation.
Survive — or collapse.
Agent Caelus, the squad leader, felt his bones begin to heat before his skin. "Time compression," he muttered under his breath. "One minute here… hours to the body."
The youngest among them, a girl named Iriya, adjusted her breath. She was a hybrid — part elemental cultivator, part soul-walker. She was used to enduring physical extremes. But this was something else. Her qi could not circulate as cleanly here.
Her body was not hers. It had been stripped down — made mortal. Normal. Weak.
And that was the test.
Each of them walked. Hours became days. Blisters bloomed. Muscles tore. The heat was a scream, the cold a whisper of knives. The first to drop was Dazen — the muscular dual-axe cultivator. His mental resistance was not his strong point. The moment his stored rations failed, he caved to the heat.
He did not die.
But the Tower returned him — collapsed and coughing blood — to the base, outside the Tower, where observers immediately tended to him.
The others lasted longer.
Caelus endured six days before he fell. Iriya lasted nine. The one who made it furthest was Nyriel — a pale woman with hollow eyes and white gloves who said nothing. She lasted twelve days, even as her soles burned to red pulp.
"This Tower... it doesn't teach," she whispered before passing out. "It breaks. And then sees what remains."
Only two remained standing: Nyriel, who somehow walked to the edge of the desert despite her ruined state — and a silent monk named Saren, whose breath never once broke rhythm
Second Floor: Reflections of the True Self
Nyriel and Saren were lifted into the Second Floor without ceremony.
The world shifted.
And now… it became beautiful.
They found themselves in a quiet garden of impossible design — floating islands of glass and memory, rivers flowing uphill, wind singing with words they once spoke.
It was disorienting, peaceful, terrifying.
Because this place reflected you.
Not as you appeared. Not even as you believed yourself to be. But as you truly were.
Saren — stoic, tranquil, revered as a living saint by some — saw himself kneeling before an execution platform, pleading not for his life, but to be allowed to kill again.
He did not understand it at first. But slowly, the Tower tore his illusions away.
"Your peace is performance," it whispered. "Your stillness is cowardice dressed in sanctity. You fear wrath — not because it is wrong, but because you cannot control it."
Saren shattered. The floor ejected him gently, without malice.
Nyriel, on the other hand, smiled when she saw her reflection.
She was standing in a quiet room with hundreds of preserved heads in jars — each of her enemies, each with a label. She ran her fingers lovingly across the glass.
"You know this is not metaphor," the Tower told her.
"I know," she said.
She passed the trial.
Aeon, watching from the Palace's high mirror platform, raised one eyebrow. "Not everyone who climbs will be virtuous," he mused. "But perhaps some truths must be ugly to be true."
Third Floor: The Weight of Burden
And so the third trial began.
The Third Floor did not announce itself. It simply opened… into a village.
A simple one. Wooden homes. A temple bell. Children playing. Smoke rising gently from cookpots.
But the moment Nyriel stepped forward, she heard the scream.
A woman — barely twenty — was giving birth. The healer was missing. The villagers saw Nyriel and begged her to help.
"You are the cultivator! You have power! Please — save her!"
It was then Nyriel realized the nature of this floor:
You were responsible. Everything here depended on your choices.
She tried walking away.
A fire broke out.
She tried intervening.
The crops failed.
No matter what she did, someone suffered. No victory was clean. No outcome was pure.
A child drowned while she was helping a mother. A beast ravaged the hills while she was feeding a starving boy. Every act had consequence — often unseen, often late.
And the Tower remembered.
"This is the price of power," it said. "Will you still ascend, knowing you cannot be just?"
Nyriel hesitated. For the first time, she broke her mask.
She screamed at the sky, then fell to her knees — not broken, but exhausted by contradiction.
She did not pass. But she was not rejected either.
Aeon watched, unmoving.
"The Third Floor is not to judge strength," he whispered to himself, "but to taste the sorrow of legacy."
Return and Report
Of the original five, only Nyriel remained conscious and intact.
She was escorted back to the ship, bleeding and silent.
Inside a sealed chamber, she removed her gloves — revealing scars shaped like blooming flowers across her palms. She wrote one sentence to the Empire's envoy in ciphered script:
"The Tower is real. It cannot be ignored."
The message was sent.
Far away, deep in the heart of the Empire's military arm, a council of nine shadows read her report.
One of them, a woman with steel-colored eyes, closed the scroll and said,
"Prepare the next unit. Begin observation of the builder."
Above the Tower, Beneath the Sky
Aeon stood alone at the half-built summit of the Tower.
The Third Floor's manifestation had stabilized — a rotating sphere of burden, anchored in Illusion and Karma.
He breathed deeply.
Behind him, artisans from the Mirrored Vale meditated in seclusion, recovering from the toll of crafting the symbolic landscape. Cultivators from the White Palace set up a scaffolding of formation arrays — the skeleton of the future Fourth Floor.
But Aeon's eyes were closed.
In his mind, he walked.
Back through the Tower.
Back through the symbolic landscape.
Back through every mistake, every triumph, every path others took.
"It's not enough to build a trial," he murmured. "I must build a path. A path that prepares them for what lies beyond."
His fingers touched the nascent designs of the Fourth Floor.
"If the First Floor was survival, the Second revelation, and the Third burden… then the Fourth shall be choice. The freedom to err, the temptation to escape — and the will to choose meaning over comfort."
He looked skyward.
He knew the Seventh Floor already.
He had seen it — not in vision, but in certainty. The moment the Tower was born, he knew where it must end.
He would face it alone, one day.
A sliver — the tiniest fragment — of the Grand Dao's power.
Not through cultivation. Not through technique.
But through will alone.
"I must be ready," he whispered. "And so must they."