It turned out the 1,792nd floor wasn't just one massive desert, which was nice. Flying over endless sands got very boring, very quickly. If reaching a floor gate had required days of having nothing but endless beige blurring by beneath me, I'm pretty sure I would've resorted to drastic and inadvisable measures.
That being said, it was a pretty big desert. Even flying across it at the absurd speed [Levitate] turned out to be capable of when I pushed it, it still took a couple of minutes before we were roaring out over open ocean.
I feel the need to point out I'm not a moron, and I did search my menus for faster solutions to the problem. There were plenty of abilities in my repertoire related to teleportation, portals, and various other space-time related shenanigans.
But I'd figured I should at least give Sssanya the chance to dump some info on me on the way. Her point that things would go smoother if I had at least rudimentary knowledge of the tower had been an apt one.
Didn't mean I had to like it.
Anyway, that was how I learned about the Floor Gate concept I mentioned earlier. It turned out that traversal between floors required travelling between special rifts dotted around each floor, and there were strict requirements for using one.
First, you had to contribute to the defeat of a high-level tower-spawned monster known as a floor boss granting you a 'token' that gave you access to the next floor. This was non-negotiable. Trying to enter a floor gate and Climb higher without a token would leave you vulnerable to things called rift monsters, which no one had ever killed, as far as the Council of 100 was aware. Few had even survived encountering them.
There were rumours about sneakier ways to go about things, but no one had ever heard of any tower-granted Skill or Spell that let you circumvent the floor gates, and the tokens couldn't be traded. Beating up the baddest beast on the floor was mandatory.
I'd felt a bit awkward when she'd told me all that. Couldn't meet her eyes for a bit.
Once you had a token, it couldn't be taken away from you. You were forever permitted to enter that floor, and you could return back down to a lower floor at your leisure, the floor gates becoming warp points that could send you all the way back down to the bottom floor of the entire tower if you felt like it, so long as you had the floor tokens. Considering there were quadrillions of souls camping down there, there was actually plenty of incentive to do so; the megacities were apparently crazy.
Not knowing all of that fundamental stuff only seemed to deepen her awe of me, which was equally amusing and exasperating. Obviously, I had Climbed the tower so long ago that such systems hadn't even been in place. Or, I had been Climbing so long I hadn't even considered the possibility of trying to go back down, and thus never learned this stuff.
It couldn't be that I'd only entered the tower a few hours ago. To be fair to her, who would even conceive of that idea? It was ludicrous.
Still gave me a good chuckle, though.
Hmm. What else was actually interesting about her explosion of exposition? It took us about twenty minutes to make our way to the main 'city' of this floor, since Sssanya insisted I slow down long before we got there, not wanting to alarm people with another sonic boom. In that time, she told me a lot of stuff. Much of said stuff went in one ear and straight out of the other, I have to admit, but I did my best to internalise the pertinent points.
This Council of 100 thing she'd mentioned before was a coalition of races who'd been roped into Climbing the tower over the course of several-million years. Or cycles to be more accurate. The idea of a civilisation spanning several million years sounded a bit farfetched, but Sssanya had disabused me of that notion.
"We have found traces of ancient civilisation on higher floors dating back eleven million cycles, according to the best postcognitives in the Council," she'd said, giving me a significant look as we rocketed through the sky.
I'd squinted back at her. Did she think I was older than that? Bit rude. I didn't even have any significant wrinkles yet.
Either way, she'd gone on to explain the Council of 100 had cycled through several iterations and couldn't really be called one continuous political entity, but the oldest version had been founded less than a million years ago. Practically a baby, really.
She'd then tried to explain the sociopolitical landscape of the Council races, but I'd shut that shit down pronto.
I'd placed my hand on her shoulder, cutting off her words. "Sssanya," I'd said gravely, giving her the most serious look I could muster. "I have hundreds of abilities revolving around language, speech, and communication. I have psychic powers that could directly convey my feelings into your mind with perfect understanding. I could upgrade your brain to grant you divine comprehension." I paused, letting that sink in. Then: "And I still can't adequately convey to you how little I care about politics. Give me the short version. One minute, tops."
So, the short version:
There were actually several orders of magnitude more races than one hundred in the Council of 100. The name was just traditional, paying homage to the OGs who actually had been a hundred Climber races who wanted to band together. No one would really be expected to know all of them, but there were a few that were unmissable no matter what route you took in your Climb, known as the High Council races.
Sssanya's najavi were one. Most of them were more modern than Sssanya's tribe, and she warned me not to avoid their eyes as best I could. Apparently they got touchy about that, since they were frequently compared to tower-spawned monsters with—what a coincidence—a gaze that could turn enemies to stone.
Then there were feathered bipeds called aviax who'd get mad if you asked them about flight because their wings were decorative, and they were insecure about it.
Tall pale people called elden considered themselves the oldest Climber race in the tower and don't you dare ever question that.
Giant eel things that swam through air called yashna who'd seethe and cope if you drank water around them because they considered it sacred or something.
Umbrakin were living shadows that you really didn't want to shine light on.
Khrondar were freaky things made of living time, whatever the fuck that meant, and 'wasting time' in their presence was a big no-no.
Vrillka were underground-dwelling four-armed bears with metallic fur that would get offended if you haggled with them because it implied you doubted their expertise in valuation.
God help you if you created too much wind around the cloud-like nebular race.
Put out even a single ember of a cindral's fire, and you were fucked.
If a resonai caught you staring at one of their tendrils, they'd zap you with so much mana your body would turn to dust.
By the time the minute was up, she had to suck in a deep breath, having filled up practically the entire time with her exposition. It was a lot to remember. Honestly, I was impressed at how fast Sssanya could speak when she was on a strict deadline, but she looked extremely distressed that she'd only managed to inform me of so little, while recognising the necessity of more important shit I needed to know.
I didn't have the heart to tell her I probably had dozens of Spells that could've directly injected all this into my brain in the blink of an eye. Not least because she would've questioned why I wasn't doing so.
My answer probably would have been as unsatisfying for her as it always was when I was even partially honest with people about why I did crazy things all the time.
Because that way would be less fun.
People had an odd habit of deciding I was crazy after I told them that.
For the rest of the trip, she rapid-fire yapped about local laws and etiquette. Blurted out an explanation on dynamics between Climbers, dungeons, bosses, monsters, XP, and a bunch more. Just the basics, allowing me to not completely fuck up while allowing me to discover the really interesting stuff for myself, which I appreciated.
By then, we were in sight of an absurdly enormous city that seemed bogglingly incongruous with the tech level I'd assumed of this place. The tribal snakes had made me think I was going to be dealing with some medieval shit. The city wasn't quite flying cars and arcologies, but many of the beige stone buildings had to be comparable to New York or Dubai or Shanghai in sheer scale, and it was definitely larger than those three. I'd thought the oasis was big, but this thing dwarfed it. Even from miles in the sky, it seemed to stretch on forever. Practically a country unto itself.
"Vyarax City," Sssanya said from where she was floating by my side. She'd gotten used to [Gravity Tyrant]'s grip pretty quick; since its fine control allowed me to negate the G-forces on her, all she had to get over was a fear of heights. "Named for the first Climber to enter the floor gate at its centre." She glanced at me, then back down at the city, and added, "That we know of."
I hummed. "Is it normal for civilisation to gather around gates?"
Sssanya nodded. "Newly discovered portals naturally attract Climbers at the frontier. Ah, the frontier is the name we use to refer to the highest floors the Climbers associated with the Council have reached."
"Are there Climbers not associated with the Council up there?"
Sssanya looked at me for a long time, then said slowly, "Yes?"
I pursed my lips. In fairness, it was a dumb question on my part, so I couldn't reach over and flick her ear as retribution. Deciding to move on like nothing had happened, I asked: "Where's the frontier currently?"
"I'm afraid I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I know there was some excitement when the vanguard reached floor 10,000 a few cycles ago."
"Huh. Thought it would be higher."
Sssanya stared at me.
Realising how that probably sounded to her, I swiftly moved on. "Do the settlements around gates usually grow this big?"
"Typically, a few dozen settlements will grow around the first discovered gates as more Climbers move up to join the vanguard and establish forward bases. As Climbers discover which gates lead to more favourable areas in the next floor, those gates will attract more Climbers, and civilisation starts to build up as people see a longer-term future in the place." She frowned down at the great city. "Most of them don't grow as big as Vyarax has."
"Why's that?"
"Usually, the one for whom the portal is named doesn't stick around to run the place."
I tilted my head. "Huh. Why did that sound so ominous?"
Sssanya seemed to be making a point of not meeting my eyes, which felt a bit hypocritical when she'd just explained a little while ago that the Najavi got butthurt when you didn't make eye contact.
Silence reigned before I eventually hedged, "I'm guessing you think this Vyarax is someone it'd be bad for me to meet?"
Sssanya still said nothing, but I got the vibe her silence spoke louder than any words she could've said.
I could only shrug. "Well, I'm still going down there. That skyline race you mentioned sounds too cool to miss."