Chapter 77: The Magic TowerThe knock came late enough that most people in the inn had been asleep for an hour.Dante opened the door and looked at Letizia. She was still in her guard clothes, her dark hair unbound, her green eyes carrying something that had been sitting in them since the tomb and hadn't been put down yet. Not fear. The particular weight of someone who had run out of people to take a problem to and arrived at the last door on the list.He stepped aside.She came in and he closed the door and put the kettle on the small stove in the corner without asking. She sat at the table and looked at her hands while the water heated, and he set two cups down and took the chair across from her and waited."Thank you," she said. "For the tomb. For what you did in there." She looked up. "Not the professional kind of thanks. The real kind.""All right.""I mean it.""I know you do." He wrapped both hands around his cup. "That's not why you came."She was quiet for a moment."No," she

Chapter 78: Top FloorThe bed accepted him without complaint and he was gone before his head finished settling.Morning came through the window with the particular indifference of mornings that had not been informed of the previous night's events. Dante lay still for a moment, ran a quick inventory of what still hurt, concluded the number was acceptable, and got up.He checked Eva's door. The silence behind it had the quality of someone still deeply under. He checked Caino's. Same situation. He ate breakfast alone at the corner table downstairs, something warm and filling that the kitchen produced without him having to think about it, and then he walked out into the blue-rune city toward the Magic Tower without waking either of them.He saw it before he reached it.The spiral structure rose above the surrounding buildings with the particular confidence of architecture that knew what it was. At least a hundred floors, golden engravings running along the outer face in continuous lines t

The top floor had the quality of a room that had been worked in for a very long time by someone who worked the way Atlantis clearly worked, everything positioned by logic rather than aesthetics, the bookshelves dense and organized in a system that made sense to the person who built it and asked nothing of anyone else.Atlantis moved to the window and looked out at the city below, and began."Ten floors," he said. "Every tower in the Celestial Domain follows the same structural regulation. The tenth floor is always the tower master's office. That's a central requirement, not a preference." He turned from the window. "Working downward from there: a ritual floor. A Supreme Floor, which holds resources connected to rare laws. Time, Fate, the categories that don't respond to standard elemental work." He paused. "A library. An alchemy lab. A prison for certain categories of detained subjects. Dormitories for the arcane scholars in residence. And a training hall at the base."Dante listened

"The entry slot," Atlantis said, "is not exclusive to you."Dante looked at him."The Duke granted you access," Atlantis continued, "but the top academy students in this city hold slots as well. Whether any of you can actually enter once you're there depends entirely on your own capability in the moment." He paused. "The River determines its own participants. The slot is permission. What you do with permission is a separate question."Dante accepted this without complaint. A shared opportunity was still an opportunity, and the alternative was the Black Swamp with its uncomfortable ratio of returns."The name," he said. "Dragon's Tears. That's not decorative."Atlantis looked at him with the mild approval of someone whose tangential questions had been answered correctly."Dragons in the Celestial Domain are not something humans casually name locations after," he said. "The name predates any living record of the place. Nobody currently breathing can tell you where it came from with cert

It didn't slow down.That was the thing Zion couldn't reconcile, standing twenty feet back with fifty years of cultivation behind him and a near-peak B-rank aura he had spent most of his adult life building. He understood comprehension mechanics the way other men understood breathing. He had taught them, written about them, evaluated them across three decades of advisory work at this tower.Comprehension speed always declined with depth. Always. The deeper a person pushed into a scripture, the more the mind strained, the more the processing rate dropped, the more the gap between what you could hold and what the text demanded widened until it outpaced you. That was the fundamental rule. That was why gold was the ceiling no one had touched.The tablet in front of the white-haired Otherworldly Climber had gone wooden in under two minutes.Bronze before most people in the room had finished settling into their own attempts.Silver in under ten.Zion said something that had no place in a fo