Threads of Broken Futures
Aeon rose before dawn, the cool breath of night still clinging to the Tower's stones. The faintest glimmer of dawn barely touched the horizon, but he was already moving, tracing sigils across an array of crystal panels laid out like petals around him. The plan for the Sixth Floor had become a quiet obsession in the hours since the Fifth had opened.
The Spiral Path had forced climbers to remember their worst truths, to live with them or rise beyond them. But that was not enough. Not yet.
They have learned how to revisit their past. Now, Aeon thought grimly, they must confront futures they fear.
Behind him, the Tower pulsed gently, its memory-laden walls humming with a resonance like a distant chime. It felt almost alive — and he supposed it was, in a way. Memory was a kind of spirit, after all, and he had woven countless memories into its bones.
Grandmother Kirell arrived at his side, moving with a grace that made her seem part of the earth itself. "You look as though you have not slept," she observed.
Aeon shook his head. "There's no time to rest. If the Seventh Floor is to break even the most unshakable, then the Sixth must truly prepare them. I want it to fracture the line between their present will and their possible failures."
Kirell regarded him in silence, a subtle sympathy crossing her ageless face. "And yourself?"
Aeon hesitated. Myself?
"Do you truly believe you can bear what the Tower will show you?"
He looked away, toward the high reaches of the Tower that had not yet been climbed. "I don't know," he admitted. "But I have no choice. I have to bear it. If I cannot face every possibility — then how can I stand on the Seventh Floor?"
Kirell laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "Then build it with that courage, my child. For there is no floor you cannot climb if you build it from your own bones."
The next day, Aeon gathered a group of formation experts, geomancers, and illusion masters to begin the foundation of the Sixth Floor. They worked within a veiled spatial rift beneath the Tower's current peak, hidden from any distant observers.
Aeon explained:
"The Sixth will be a fractal of time. A cultivator will step inside and see branches of their life spiraling outward. Choices they could have made. Paths they might have walked. Triumphs they lost. Failures they never dared imagine."
One geomancer shivered. "That is cruel," she whispered.
"Cruel, yes," Aeon agreed, "but necessary. Because the Seventh will hold no mercy."
They began shaping a network of temporal arrays, etching them with memory-ink harvested from the Tower's deepest root. This root was no simple stone; it contained the echoes of every step, every heartbeat, every despair that had passed through its walls.
From these echoes, the Sixth Floor would weave a new kind of trial.
On the fourth day of construction, as the first time-weaving talismans settled into their sockets, Aeon took a moment alone. He stood in the half-built floor, surrounded by an ever-shifting haze of futures. Each one rippled against him like cold water, showing snatches of possibility:
— Aeon failing to protect the Tower.
— Aeon giving up, walking away.
— Aeon dying nameless in a forgotten field.
They stabbed at him, more vicious than any physical wound.
Will I really stand to face these?
He closed his eyes, drawing his breath in steady rhythm. One after another, he forced the visions to flow past him, refusing to let them bury his heart.
I am the Architect. I do not run from what I build.
Meanwhile, outside the Tower, the Empire's second contingent remained encamped, waiting for word of the Sixth. Rumors ran like wildfire through their ranks:
"They say the Fifth twisted your memories…"
"They say the Sixth will show you how you fail."
"Is that even cultivation anymore? Or something beyond it?"
Sayrin, the Heaven-Chosen knight who had survived the Spiral, watched the half-built entrance with an unblinking stare. She had emerged from the Fifth Floor changed, stripped of illusions. Part of her burned to climb again, no matter the price.
"Captain," she said to the Imperial leader, "when it opens, I will go first."
The Captain nodded, reluctant but resigned. "If any among us can face it, Sayrin, it is you."
By the tenth day, the Sixth Floor's central hall had taken shape: a vast spherical chamber, its walls etched with thousands of flowing fractal lines. Each line held a shimmer of hidden memory, flickering with potential like fireflies under moonlight.
Aeon stood at its heart.
He felt…small, for a moment. A mere boy before a cosmic tapestry.
If they climb this floor, he thought, they will face every moment that ever could have broken them. And if they climb through…
He tightened his hands into fists.
Then they will be worthy of the Seventh.
That night, Aeon retreated to the quiet at the Tower's lowest foundations. Among its original stones, he sat cross-legged, eyes half-shut. Fatigue burned through his bones, but his mind would not rest.
He thought of the Seventh — of a trial so severe that even a fraction of the Grand Dao's will would crush the unworthy.
I will climb it, Aeon swore silently. And I will leave no regret behind.
His voice barely rose above a whisper:
"Tower… witness me."
The stones hummed in answer, as if acknowledging his vow.
And beyond, in the deepest night, the Grand Dao seemed to shift — a distant, unfathomable awareness brushing Aeon's mind, recognizing that a true contender had begun to shape the path toward its shadow.