License to Cultivate [Progression Fantasy Tower Climber] (FOUR books completed!)

Chang-li stepped out into the second floor of the Primal Tower.

Everything was orange. Orange lux pressed in on him. Every surface he saw was a different hue of orange. It took his eyes a moment to adjust, and as he was doing so, he became aware of an unpleasant sensation all over his exposed skin. A wind was blowing, driving tiny orange particles against his hands, face, and eyes. They bit his skin, rasping it like tiny daggers.

It was the strangest and most hostile landscape he had ever seen. The ground underfoot was solid orange, with piles of tiny orange flecks drifting here and there like sand. They had emerged from a tall orange pillar, which stretched skyward, disappearing above them into a swirl of orange.

Min and Hiroko both cried out. Hiroko had her hands covering her face. Min was gritting her teeth and squinting. "What is this?"

"Cycle red," Joshi ordered. "Strengthen your body. You will resist this. You've both reached the Peak of Bodily Refinement. This is an irritation, nothing more."

"Easy for you to say when you're two tiers higher than us," Min snapped. A muscle in her jaw worked. Chang-li could see she was cycling. He didn't dare do the same. The discomfort wasn't worth the risk of further exacerbating the Lens inside his soul.

Hiroko was whimpering softly. "It hurts." Chang-li was surprised. She'd been through much worse than this without complaint. Joshi was there, speaking softly to her. "You don't mean the wind, do you?"

Still with her hands over her eyes, she shook her head. "It's hard to breathe," she complained.

"What's wrong?" Chang-li asked.

Joshi glanced at him, frowning, his eyebrows drawing together. "I think it's because there's no blue lux at all here. Can you feel it?"

Chang-li did. This floor was as full of orange lux as the one below had been of red. What wasn't orange was red, with hints of yellow. There seemed to be no spiritual luxes here at all. That might present a challenge.

"Let's look at this as a training opportunity," he said and produced a pair of blindfolds from his sack. He handed one to each of the women. "Use these on your eyes. It'll keep them from getting irritated, and you both need to be working on the Veil of Sight anyway," he added.

Min snatched one up and gave him a glare. Chang-li wasn't sure what else he was supposed to be saying right now. Min went to Hiroko. "Let me help you with this. Here, lower your hands. There."

She deftly tied the blindfold over Hiroko's eyes. "That's a little better."

"I know. This place is horrible. We'll work on it as much as we can. I'm sorry." She looked at Chang-li as she took the other blindfold from him. "Now what?" she asked.

"Now we try to determine what the challenge is here," he said, as she tied the blindfold around her eyes. "Give Joshi and me a minute to get our bearings," he told them.

He and Joshi walked a little ways from the pillar to stare about, exposing them to the driving sand. Chang-li was starting to wish he was wearing a blindfold as well, but he needed all of his senses right now. Lux pillars stuck up everywhere, a forest or maze of them. There was movement here and there among the pillars in the distance. Hard to make out what, without any other colors to aid his sight.

He stretched out his will, already feeling it answer to him a little better. He could feel something, but not in detail. "It doesn't feel alive," he said.

Joshi nodded. "Lux constructs of some sort, most likely. I'll send Magen to scout."

The little lux creature darted off ahead as Chang-li tried to accustom himself to the surroundings. The nearest couple of lux pillars were smooth octagons rising from the ground. They had gouges out of them, ranging in size from a few inches long to taller than Chang-li. He couldn't tell what had made those marks. It was like someone had scooped part of the pillar out and taken it away, but what or why, he couldn't imagine.

Now though, he started to use his lux senses, concentrating more on the sounds they were making than the sight. With so much orange here, it was like listening to a single note played over and over again, drowning out any other subtleties that he might have heard. The more he listened, the more variation he heard within that one note. Chang-li frowned. How did that make any sense?

He switched back to what he thought of as lux sight again and strained. Was it his imagination, or was some of this orange a little more red? Some of it a bit more yellow?

He tried to describe what he was seeing to Joshi, who shook his head. "It sounds to me like you are making progress toward Lux Endowment," Joshi said.

"That'd be nice," Chang-li agreed as Magen returned.

Joshi reported, "Magen has seen something interesting. An oasis of spiritual luxes some distance ahead of us. There's blue there, for certain. It's defended, though. Magen can't get a good look. He's very confused by this place, as am I."

"Well," Chang-li said, "we either stay here or we go forward. If we're going anywhere, we might as well have a destination. And Hiroko will appreciate if we find her some blue lux. I say, let's give it a look."

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Joshi nodded. "Agreed. I'm with you."

The four set off together through the maze of orange pillars, Chang-li instructing Min and Hiroko on how to use their lux senses to navigate. Joshi and Magan ranged ahead, watching for threats as Chang-li coached the women. At the same time, he was using his own lux senses to stretch out all around him and appreciate the differences in the orange lux.

This floor presented a fantastic opportunity for training for all of them. Hiroko and Min needed to use lux sight even to move. The constant tiny grains of orange material buffeting their bodies forced them to cycle a slow repetition of Purification of Mind and Soul. Chang-li couldn't risk that, so instead he focused his will, keeping it bound tightly around himself.

Will allowed a cultivator to manipulate lux outside his own body. This was a perfect opportunity to practice that. He projected his will a few inches beyond his skin and hardened it. "Nothing touches me without my allowing it," he told himself.

The tiny flecks of lux struck against his will, constantly probing his will for weak spots. It let him understand how his will responded to his own thoughts and showed him he wasn't nearly as good with it as he wanted to be. Chang-li split his focus between maintaining his will, encouraging Min and Hiroko, and watching for enemies.

When Joshi gave a cry of alarm, Chang-li's concentration collapsed. His will dissolved. Flecks of lux pelted against his exposed skin. He ignored it. "Wait here," he told the women, sending his lux senses out questing.

He spotted what had disturbed Joshi, a handful of dense lux signatures moving toward them from amongst a thick forest of orange pillars. Drawing his sword, he joined Joshi, and together they took up a grim stance.

"They've spotted us," Joshi said.

"What are they?"

But Chang-li's question was answered as, from around the corner of a pillar, appeared a floating axe with a long handle. It moved toward them, the handle swaying slightly underneath as it bobbed along. Seconds later, a pair of flying swords and a dagger joined it. They were rough-carved from orange lux substance, and Chang-li realized at once that they had been torn from the pillars around them. That was what had caused the gouges and wounds.

There was no more time as the weapons raced forward. Joshi threw out a Binding Chains and caught the axe, slamming it into the ground, as the other weapons flew past him. Chang-li stepped forward and swung Liar's Blade to meet the pair of incoming swords. The dagger zipped in under his arm and raced toward Joshi, who spotted it, bringing up his left hand and deflecting with a red lux shield on his arm. The dagger bounced off and fell away.

Chang-li was fighting a pair of swords which moved together as though controlled by a single mind. This was far more difficult than fighting an opponent wielding two swords. A human opponent, even a cultivator, would be limited in some ways by their body and what their arms and legs could do. These swords flew together inches apart, and then, as he raised his blade to counter them, split in two in a perfectly sequenced pincer attack.

Chang-li knocked the left-hand blade aside. It whirled, and he brought his sword down hard against the other, smashing it to the ground. He leapt forward and slammed his sandaled foot against the orange blade. It cracked and began dissolving into orange lux that raised skyward like a plume of smoke.

He pivoted again as the remaining blade came in. Joshi had destroyed the dagger and yanked the other weapon in close with Binding Chains. He dispatched it with one vigorous punch as Chang-li smashed his blade into the other lux sword. It cracked, shivered, and dissolved into lux.

There were no further signs of enemies, and they retreated back to the girls, who were waiting nervously. Min had raised her blindfold and was peeking through one squinted eye. "What was using those weapons?"

"Nothing. They are sentient embodiments of lux," Chang-li declared.

She frowned. "How could that be?"

Joshi shrugged. "The tower creates beasts are clever enough to fight us, why not weapons?"

Min pursed her lips. "I suppose," she allowed.

"I think they are formed from these pillars," Chang-li said. He pointed out a gouge in the nearest. "If that's the case, we should expect hundreds of them. We could be attacked at any time. We need to be prepared."

"They were not difficult opponents," Joshi said, "but our technique was poor. We are wasting too much lux and attention on them. We need to handle them more efficiently." He frowned. "What I need is a way to modify my Binding Chains to send out more sets of less powerful chains at once. I should have been able to catch that entire group in midair and deal with them at once."

"I still have plenty of scrolls of Firepot and Earthshake," Chang-li said, "but it would have been overkill for just those. Min, were you able to sense them coming?"

She shook her head. "Not until after you engaged them, and I couldn't get a good sense of what they were, so I peeked," she finished, looking a bit embarrassed.

"Try to stretch your lux senses out further. If you could shoot down some of them before they get near us, that will help."

She looked skeptical. "You expect me to shoot something like that without being able to look at it?"

"Yes," he said firmly.

Hiroko spoke up. "I could see them in lux vision, but…", she made a helpless fluttering gesture with her fingers, "I could not sense them as living creatures. They have no spiritual luxes at all. I would not be able to drain life force from them because they don't have any life force." She frowned for a moment before saying, "I think they're powered with something akin to will."

That made sense to Chang-li. It also gave him an idea. His will could manipulate lux. So far, he had used it largely for his own lux, although on a handful of occasions he had wrested control of another cultivator's lux away. In those cases, he had processed it through his core, cycling and venting it through his channels. But what if he could command lux outside himself merely by force of will? He resolved to practice.

With their brief conversation over, the four resumed their journey onward.

As he had predicted, there were plenty more enemies. A rain of arrows fell on them with almost no warning. Joshi shouted and pushed Hiroko back against one orange pillar. He stood in front of her, flaring his own lux and producing a shield to protect his face and torso. Over to the side, Min had summoned her bow and was firing an arrow.

Chang-li focused his whole being. He could see each of the arrows with his lux senses, noted how each of them had a slightly different shade of orange. Twelve arrows in all, raining down toward them as though they'd been shot by an unseen crew of archers from up ahead.

He imagined his will as a shield like Joshi's, but farther out in front of them. He wasn't trying to wrest control of this lux away from whatever mind was commanding it. He was just deflecting it, pushing it away from himself.

The arrows hit his will. Three of them punched straight through, continuing toward the group. The others deflected, their paths slightly altered, whizzing harmlessly past as the final three sought their targets. Two thudded against Joshi's shield, while the third tore through the loose sleeve on Chang-li's robe.

Joshi stepped away from Hiroko, lowering his shield. "That was effective," he said.

Chang-li was already frowning. "I should have stopped all of them. Those were pathetic."

"Agreed," Joshi said, "but I think you'll have plenty of time to practice."