Arlon sat cross-legged on the cold, cracked stone floor, his breathing steady as he exhaled slowly.
His training session had just ended, and the residual energy still pulsed through his limbs.
His body had long since adjusted to the Tower's relentless time dilation, but even so, the weight of the years was something that never quite disappeared.
A decade.
It had been ten full years since he cleared Floor 83, since he first laid eyes on the strange mana currents that ran beneath the Tower's foundation.
The discovery had changed something in him. It had made the Tower feel less like a challenge and more like a puzzle waiting to be solved.
At first, he thought it was a fluke.
Some kind of residual energy left over from the Tower's construction.
But then, when he advanced to Floor 85, he saw it again. And now, here, on Floor 89, the same phenomenon had appeared.
Faint, almost invisible streams of mana were woven through the structure itself like veins in a living body.
