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

After searching the smithy, they found an assortment of weapons, all forged from orange lux and relatively useless. More importantly, in the house adjacent, was a locked chest. When broken open it proved to contain a coffer wrapped with lux-enforced metal that held a trio of pulsing gems, multifaceted, each a different color.

They were a variant on lux crystals. Chang-li recognized them at once though he'd never seen one before, and he whistled in appreciation. "These are lux batteries," he said. "They contain vast reservoirs of lux, which can be tapped by a cultivator. More than that, they will easily refill from anything in the environment. These are exactly what we need to survive here."

The largest of the three was a deep royal blue hue. Chang-li handed it at once to Hiroko, who cupped it in her hands, staring at the bauble. The lux battery itself sat heavily on the palm of her hand, about three inches across. Her eyes widened as she stared at it.

"How can something this small contain so much lux?"

"It's due to the crystalline shape of its structure," Chang-li said. "A lattice of crosshatched—" He cut himself off because she wasn't really paying attention. "Never mind. Just be careful how much you take out of it and be sure you channel through it when you're cycling. It will allow you to replenish with whatever shreds of blue are in the atmosphere here."

He considered the other two gems. One was yellow, and he desperately wanted to keep it, but right now he could barely use lux himself.

On the other hand, Joshi rarely used yellow lux. The Darwur cultivator pointed at Min. "She should have it."

Min looked surprised. "What?"

Joshi shrugged. "You can give it to Chang-li once he's removed the Lens, if you want, but your arrowheads are powerful, and if you imbue them with more yellow lux, they'll be even stronger. You should have it."

"I agree," Chang-li said, before giving the bauble to Min.

The third was orange, which wasn't much use to them here, but he tossed it to Joshi, who accepted with a nod. "If the next floor is as full of yellow lux as this one is of orange, I'll need it."

Whether it was their improved physiques, their cultivation adapting them to the harsh conditions of this floor, or the availability of more of the spiritual luxes, none of them needed long to recover. After a few hours of cycling, the women declared themselves ready to move on, and Chang-li concurred. He was impressed with their progress. Hiroko had made progress toward passing the Veil of Sight, and Min was pushing herself to discover what the second veil held for her. Meanwhile, Chang-li felt as though he was making progress at beginning to understand what Lux Endowment was about.

As they went on and on, pushing through this orange hell, he began to truly appreciate what orange lux was capable of. He, more than anyone, knew that orange was more than the mere quick way of fashioning weapons that so many cultivators treated it as. His Firepot spell used orange as a protective shell. Joshi, too, used orange defensively as well as offensively, but now he began to understand it even more.

Orange was not about making weapons anywhere you went. It was about reshaping the physical properties of unliving things, just as red, at its lowest levels, was about reshaping your own body. At higher levels, and in weaves, red could be combined with spiritual luxes to affect other living creatures. Chang-li knew that from the texts and scripts he had read. If orange was analogous, weaving it together with the right spiritual luxes might let him change the structure of objects that his enemies were using against him.

He thought of the things he had seen Prisms do or read about them doing in tales. Lux Smiths and the Imperial Technicians who crafted lux artifacts used orange heavily in their creations. It was definitely a more versatile color than he had first realized.

He had a chance to put that to the test at the next oasis, this one in the east quadrant of the floor. A sequence of pillars, each pillar about four foot square, beginning waist height, rose in stair steps over their heads in a spiraling inward pattern. The central pillar was tall enough that its top vanished into the orange clouds. It was pretty obvious what they had to do.

"It can't be that simple, can it?" Joshi asked, studying the pillars. "This doesn't look like much of a test for anyone who's reached the Peak of Bodily Refinement."

"We'll keep an eye out. Most likely we'll be attacked during the climb," Chang-li said. "Min's arrows might be the most useful here. Make sure Magen scouts for us," he added as they approached the first of the pillars.

They decided Chang-li would lead, with Hiroko and Min following and Joshi bringing up the rear to deal with threats. Min had her bow ready. Joshi was prepared to use Binding Chains on anything he saw, and Chang-li would use his sword on anything that descended the pillars to meet them. Hiroko and Magen were their scouts, watching with lux-keen senses.

Leaping across the five-foot gap between the first pillar and the next was no great challenge. Chang-li made the first couple of jumps easily before he glanced down. He'd gotten higher than he realized already. It didn't make the next leap any harder, but now he was aware of the cost of failure and worried about the others. He turned to offer help. Min saw what he was doing. "Keep climbing," she scolded him. "We're fine."

He turned and kept on.

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"Flying enemies incoming!" Joshi shouted a warning.

It was more of the disembodied weapons racing forward toward them. Min shot down most of them while Joshi sent out a fan of Binding Chains to knock down more of the rest.

"Something's waiting for us," Hiroko said quietly, "but I don't know if it's an enemy."

Sword in hand, Chang-li kept climbing. They were high above the floor of the orange desert now, the clouds beginning to part. He got a distant look at the last platform and focused his lux sight on it. His senses recoiled at the clashing chords and violent colors he saw there.

Whatever was waiting for them, it was powerful. Much more powerful than the other guardians had been, or even than he expected a floor guardian to be.

"What's up there feels like a Prism!" he shouted back to his friends. "Should we go back?"

"How can we?" Joshi countered. "The only way forward is to climb. You know that."

He did. It was hard bringing his wife and friends along with him, but Chang-li wasn't going to back down from any challenge. So far, this tower had been full of chances for advancement. Even with his handicap, he was taking full advantage of that.

Chang-li kept climbing.

The frequent attacks felt almost perfunctory, as though to remind them that they were still inside a tower. The real pressure on Chang-li was the knowledge that Eri's people might well enter the tower already and be seeking to climb, that they didn't know when General Li would best the Tower Guardian, or what waited for them.

He kept going and soon reached the top.

The final central pillar was five times the diameter of the smaller ones. In the center waited a wizened old woman wearing orange robes. Her hair was silver and fell to her waist. She leaned heavily on a staff.

Chang-li jumped to the platform in front of her. His friends followed. The old woman coughed and looked up at him from under a heavily wrinkled brow. "Took you long enough, didn't it?" she snapped.

Chang-li blinked down at her. "Forgive me, Elder. I don't know what you're talking about."

"Naturally, you don't," she said. "I've been waiting here for weeks now to give you this message. Took a lot out of me to get here, so be sure to tell your master he owes me for this one."

Chang-li blinked. "You what?"

She sighed. "I've already spent more than enough time here, boy. Now listen." She glared at him from under rheumy eyelids. "Your master hopes to be here to help take you in hand before the end of your journey. He says, you are on no circumstances to accept any offer from General Li without having it in writing and understanding what it means.

"He also said, if you haven't already sought out help from someone smarter than you about that Lens, don't do it now. He's going to be here to take things in hand soon enough. Oh, and this." She reached out and handed him two items. One was the token, which read East. The other was a bracelet.

Chang-li stared at it. It was a lux suppressor. His heart fell. "Thank you, Revered Elder," he said, his mind still spinning as he wondered how, who this woman was, how she'd gotten a message from Noren, and what she was doing here. "But I have lux suppressors with me, and they don't do any good." One of the first things he had tried after waking up, in fact, seeing whether the lux Suppressor bracelet he had affected the Lens.

The woman rolled her eyes and coughed. "Don't be an idiot, boy. Of course this isn't a lux suppressor. This is something different, something special. But it isn't a fix or a cure. You still were tomfool enough to bind a Lens to yourself without knowing what you were doing, and at far too low a level. This will let you use lux a bit, but if you overload it, you're going to have a backlash that may well set about your own demise.

"Still, if you aren't able to start really cycling and using lux, you have no hope of getting strong enough to survive what's going to come." Her filmy eyes studied him and she gave a little sigh. "I won't lie to you, boy. You're in a bad spot. Never heard of anyone survive a Lens in their soul this early. But Noren hasn't given up on you yet, then neither should you.

"Here's my advice: push for advancement as hard and fast as you can. Advancement's never the wrong answer for anything. If your master is planning what I think he's planning, you've got to be reaching Lux Endowment as fast as you can."

Chang-li's hands closed over both items. "Thank you," he said.

An instant later, she was gone. An enormous white raven remained in her place. It looked up at him through dark eyes, gave a single call, then lifted off the pedestal, flapped away, and vanished.

Chang-li turned back to the others. "What was that?" They looked as bewildered as he did. He held up the token. "I guess she defeated the protector for us?"

"If that was the case," Joshi grumbled, "she could have waited for us at the bottom and saved all of that trouble. Now we've got to get all the way back down again."

Min let off a laugh. "Oh, high-level cultivators are always so infuriating. What level do you think she was? She felt almost like a Prism to me, but none of the Prisms are old like that. Powerful cultivators usually choose to appear much younger."

"Nai Hong didn't," Chang-li mused. "I suppose if you can rebuild your body with lux, you can choose to look any way you choose. Maybe she likes being a cranky old woman, or a raven." He sighed. "I'll bring up the rear this time," he said. Holding up the bracelet, he studied it before slipping it onto his wrist. "I want to figure out just what this does."

For the next few hours, as they made their way quietly together toward the last of the oases, Chang-li cycled and studied the effect the bracer was having on the Lens and his core. He could feel it on his wrist, tapping into his channels, shifting them just a bit.

A lux suppressor bracelet worked by limiting how much lux a body could take in. This wasn't that. It put no impingement on the amount of lux he was drawing in at all. Instead, it seemed to work along with his own will to keep the lux in his channels and core and negate the pull the Lens was having.

He pulled in pure orange lux, easy to do, since the place was so suffused with it, and focused on the note it made.

Pure. Perfect.

There was the discordant half-step made by the Lens, and here, at the same time, a step in the other direction made by this bracer. It wasn't cancelling out the Lens's note at all, the way he had thought it might be possible. Instead, it was transforming what the Lens did, making an entire chord of sound that, instead of discordant, felt musical. Complete.

As they neared the final oasis, Chang-li explained to the others what was going on.

Min looked worried. "I don't think you should be trying to do techniques," she said. "Stick with the sword and your scrolls. It's safer."

"I need to know if I can trust this," he told her. "I'm less than half a cultivator right now. You heard what the old woman said. I need to be striving to reach Lux Endowment. I can't do that if I'm not cycling, filling myself with lux. Seeking to understand and use it. The best way I've found for doing that is in the heat of battle. That's when it really matters."

"He's right," Joshi told Min. "We'd better know now whether this is going to work."

Min fell silent, and Chang-li got the sense she wasn't convinced, but now wasn't the time. They had a new challenge to face.