The night in the Tower deepened.
Within the Fourth Floor's dream-forged sanctuary, Aeon stood before the mirror once more. Unlike the others, he had not yet stepped through a single door. He had watched failures and triumphs, traced the karmic echoes of alternate lives, and walked through the threads spun by the Mirrored Vale. But he had not made his own choice—not here.
He reached out, and for the first time, the mirror responded. Not with another version of him, but with a world where the Tower itself had never been built.
A world of silence.
A world of stagnation.
He saw the Empire slowly crumble, unchallenged and bloated, filled with cultivators pursuing comfort over truth. He saw the Ancestors never stirred from slumber. He saw himself—a distant echo, wandering through distant lands, detached and purposeless.
"This is not one of the six paths," Aeon murmured.
The Tower answered.
"This is the path unmade."
He stepped back, breath shallow. To not choose, to abandon the act of choosing—this, too, was a decision. The Fourth Floor had become a moral crucible, one that recognized not merely ambition or survival, but vision.
And Aeon, at his core, was a being of vision.
Archivist Nell sat in silence beneath the Tree of Threads, where climbers recovered their spiritual bearings. The Tower allowed her momentary solitude before departure. Her hand trembled slightly as she wrote into her floating book of memories.
She had chosen not to enter any path. Not cowardice—honesty. And the Tower had judged her with the weight of restraint, not punishment.
A voice interrupted her thoughts.
"Will you report favorably?"
It was Aeon.
Nell did not flinch. "The Empire sent me to assess strategic value. I will return with something far more dangerous."
Aeon waited.
"They asked if the Tower was useful," she said slowly. "It is not useful. It is transformative."
Aeon bowed lightly. "That is more than I expected."
"You gave me the choice to walk through truth. The Empire will now have to choose whether to walk into it—or around it."
She left with no further word. A single silver leaf from the Tree of Threads floated after her as she vanished into the descending spiral.
There could be no more delay.
Aeon walked back into the mirror chamber. The six doors reformed. Each shimmered with the agony of meaning. And in the center, a new passage opened—the Seventh Door. The Creator's Trial.
His.
When he entered, he did not find a door. He found a shore.
Vast ocean stretched before him, and behind, a mountain range impossibly steep. He stood between two extremes—endless change and absolute stasis. Neither offered refuge.
From the ocean came voices. Every version of himself called out. Begged, threatened, laughed. Their cries twisted into one another, cacophonous.
"Pick us. Save us. Forget them. You owe it to yourself."
Aeon walked forward.
He stepped into the surf, not to drown, but to listen.
Each wave that struck him contained a decision he had once made—refusing to lie to the Assembly at ten years old, defending a condemned heretic philosopher at fifteen, choosing to build the Tower instead of vying for military command.
Each choice was a wound. Each was also a seed.
Then the water stilled. Before him appeared a vast tree, its roots drinking from the sea, its branches climbing into storm.
And there, nailed to the trunk, was himself.
Eyes open.
Silent.
Aeon stepped closer. The crucified version of himself opened his mouth—not to scream, but to speak a single word:
"Continue."
When Aeon emerged, time had not moved in the outer world. And yet, everyone nearby knew.
He carried no weapon, no wound, no blessing.
But his eyes—they had changed.
The Ancestors felt it from their seclusion. The Empire's watchers saw it from afar. The Tower had recognized its master not as architect, but as witness.
And Aeon, for the first time, allowed himself to rest.
Only for a moment.
The Foundation of the Fifth
That night, he did not sleep.
The Fourth Floor was sealed. It now stood as the Tower's cruelest layer thus far—not because it killed, but because it revealed. And that kind of truth could never be forgotten.
Aeon stood at the Fifth Floor's anchor point.
This time, he would not begin alone.
He called to the Ancestors. To Vyra. To Nell. To those who had climbed.
He summoned them not to serve—but to speak.
"The Fifth Floor will be the bridge between change and essence. It must show that transformation is not loss, and that those who walk the Tower do not abandon their former selves, but refine them."
The blueprint he drafted bore no doors, no mirrors.
It bore a spiral. A path of looping ascent, where each step retraced the past—but altered it.
The Fifth Floor would not offer new trials. It would offer new understanding. The climber would walk through shadows they had already survived—and discover what they had missed the first time.
In the dark.
Alone.
But this time, with memory as a lantern.