The Tower Climbers Return: Rebirth of the Archmage

[Congratulations, we are awaiting for you to challenge the tower yet again the next time around.]

Those were the last words Oliver could see as he felt his vision spin, the o so bright, lively and packed hub world he had only just returned to blended as it turned into a rather spacious living room, decorated with old European style wooden furniture.

As his vision stabilized his other feelings started coming back. Hearing, he could hear soft and gentle hushing sounds, and the sounds of a hand rubbing hair and fabric.

Smell, he could smell a flowery perfume coming through the old stuffy smell of the room. And last but not least touch, he could feel himself sitting on 2 soft tights, a hand gently rubbing his back, and his own hands tightly holding a woman, a woman much bigger than him.

'Analivia, it … really worked.'

Relaxing Oliver started thinking, especially about today, he was pretty sure that this was his first ever lasting memory, or maybe this one just overwrote the others. Two weeks after his 12th birthday, the day of his parents funeral.

Analivia was his personal maid, and also the only maid who stayed after his parents death, the rest simply left after their contracts were up due to them feeling that the family, and thus their jobs, weren't stable anymore.

Analivia however, even though she had no one but herself to rely on at the ripe old age of 24, stayed, caring for him for another 6 years, right up until that fated day.

'I never met her again after people started getting transported into the greater world of [the tower]. I always kept looking for her, even though I knew, in the back of my mind that …'

After a few more minutes of laying in her embrace Oliver pushed himself away.

"Ana, thank you, but I need some time for myself, but before that."

Oliver walked to the corner of the room, taking a piece of paper from his antique desk and wrote 3 names on it.

Emma Van Vleermuizen

Veronica Hildenberg

Melissa Johnson

"They are the maid candidates my father often spoke about, they are young, and currently don't have a family to rely upon, so he wanted to train them. In our current predicament I think it is best if we go through with his plans. He liked to keep their identities secret, so I doubt that we will be able to find their names once I forget them."

Analivia took the piece of paper while gently smiling at Oliver, she wasn't surprised, after all his father had been talking about raising their own maids, and he was for lack of a better term rather paranoid most of the time.

"Don't worry Oliver, I will make sure all of them are on the grounds within a month."

She said before giving him a quick hug and leaving the room.

As she closed the door Oliver didn't stay idle, he immediately started writing on that same desk he pulled that piece of paper from. Reliable allies were one thing, he needed them after all for the floors where one was required to work together. But personal strength was the most important thing.

There was only one main title on the page, written in bold letters above the paragraphs Oliver was currently scribbling down beneath it.

The Tutorial(Floor 0)

'The other floors can wait, once I make it through [the tutorial] my mind will be enhanced by a decent bit, so remembering the details from higher floors can be more easily done then.'

'[The tower] has a massive snowball problem, meaning that if you don't start off right, your future will be damaged massively, so I should just spend all of my effort on the [floor 0].'

Oliver knew all too well how important [the tutorial] was, after all, the only reason he got to the upper echelon of individual in his previous life was because he gained a decent class, a bronze grade mage class in the tutorial through nothing more than luck.

Everything in the tower was graded, from common, white, bronze, silver, gold, and finally digit. Digit being the rank of the strongest 100.000 things in that category. Grade digit (1) naturally being the strongest, and digit (100.000) being the weakest.

items ranked 1-9 were the very strongest [Single Digit] equipment.

Items ranked 10-99 were [Two Digit] equipment.

Items ranked 100-999 were [Three Digit] equipment.

Items ranked 1000-9999 were [Four Digit] equipment.

Beyond this, there was also the [Unified Ranking] that considered all equipment regardless of piece or class type. Since there were many more, the [Tower] ranked a total of 99,999 of them, which went up to [Unified Five Digits].

[Common] grade items could be, for example a blade made by a decent blacksmith, these could be found in nearly every shop. [White] grade items could only be made by highly skilled individuals, and even then, they needed at least decent materials that not everyone could get their hands on.

[Bronze] grade was a grade only reached when a skilled crafter made a true masterpiece, using high grade recourses as a base. [Silver] grade could not be achieved purely through skill, luck was also a factor, there were true master crafters who never had the pleasure of making [silver] grade equipment.

As for [gold] grade, Oliver, even though he had been stuck on floor 69 like all highest climbers hadn't seen enough of them to know how rare or profound they were. Not even speaking about the lowest rank [digit] equipment, he hadn't even heard rumors about them. He was sure some pieces, maybe only a handful at most, existed, but he wasn't privy to such information.

And so the night continued with Oliver writing and writing, he didn't care about grammar or order, he just wrote every single thing he could remember about [the tutorial]. The next morning, as he walked out of his room with blisters and wounds all over his writhing had he had filled a total of 58 pages full of info.

'Luckily information regarding the tutorial gets less and less restrictive the higher your hub world is, otherwise I doubt I would get my hands on so much info.'

Every 10 floors in [the tower] signified a big change, and a new hub world, where challenges rested and trained between climbing attempts. Oliver, being a resident of the 6th hub world had a super easy time getting info regarding the tutorial. Even hidden pieces that only a single challenger could take were openly talked about.

It wasn't like one couldn't return to lower hub worlds, but at that point, where everyone was stuck on a single floor, no one really cared about [the tutorial] anymore. Even those that had descendants that challenged it barely gave them a look, much less advise.