Equipment can have three purposes: it can increase your fighting ability, improve your defenses, or support you as you climb. If you have a choice, almost without exception the support items will best improve your chances of climbing the Tower.

Billy Stevens - Equipment Specialist Climber Academy

Welcome to the Eternal Tower Floor 2 Hard!

Goal: Defeat the Boss Enemy

0/1 Boss Enemy

Time limit: 5 days

Note: time dilation in effect.

You have to be fucking kidding me. It was the same damn challenge.

Looking around I was in the same starting location. The only difference from the first floor was that I had all my equipment from the last floor. I was so pissed.

This was a common type of floor on the Medium Difficulty. You basically completed the previous floor a second time with additional goals. Five days was not a tight deadline if I skipped the normal enemies and went straight for the boss. But that did not feel right. I had already defeated the boss once, there was no reason I wouldn’t be able to defeat him again. I knew the Tower would change something like giving him fireballs or making him faster.

But the worst thing was that I would be stuck eating this crappy jerky.

Frustrated, I swung my sword-ax at the wall behind me. Surprisingly the wall gave way to reveal a small chamber. Checking the broken wall, it was clear that any slight pressure would have made it give way. I was certain this was not on the first floor as I had thoroughly checked the walls when I was looking for the hidden reward. I stepped into the small chamber and found that it contained a stone altar with a necklace on it.

Congratulations you have found the hidden treasure: Overtime Necklace.

The necklace was simple steel with a smooth dark stone the size of my thumbnail hanging from it. Without the scan skill I had no idea what it did. Putting the necklace on I didn’t feel any different. I checked my stats and skills but they remained the same. The only difference was on the time remaining on the floor description.

Time limit: 5 days

Time remaining: 4 days 23 hours, 53 minutes*

*Overtime not in effect

Leaving the cave I made my way towards the boss location from the first floor which would take me about 8 hours if I wasn’t interrupted by other orcs.

As I walked, I tried to activate the Overtime Necklace as I was instructing in the Academy but nothing worked. I tried simple commands like “activate” and “overtime”, but there was no change. Usually the way to activate an item was in the description of the item. It would be nice to have the scan skill to get the item description. I ran through all the activation words and commands I could remember even the obscure ones like “go, go, gadget” to “wonder powers active”. Finally I gave up as I started to spot orc patrols. The orcs had horrible eyesight but could hear better than I could.

Knowing that this was the Hard Difficulty, I severely doubted the boss was in the same area. While I was sure it wouldn’t be easy to find the boss, I still wanted to check where it was on the first floor. When I arrived, I was surprised to see that there was an orc sitting in front of the tent in the same way I had seen on the first floor. While it was the standard orc in appearance, I could not be certain if it was the boss or just a decoy and the boss was somewhere else on the floor. If it was the boss it would be significantly more difficult than the first floor.

So far, the second floor had held no challenge and as best as I could tell was identical to the first floor. While the time limit seemed strict compared to the 30 days it took me to beat the boss initially, most of that time had been spent tracking down and killing the other orcs and orc witches. The only thing that made sense was a significantly stronger boss.

If I had more time I would kill regular monsters until I reached level 15, then complete my breakthrough and gain a couple of more levels before fighting the boss. But the issue was that I didn’t know how long it would take to have that breakthrough. The breakthrough to the late stage had taken twice as long as the breakthrough to the middle stage. If that held true again then it would take me eight days to achieve the breakthrough.

This was the biggest drawback of cultivating. Once I started down the cultivation path I had to achieve the breakthroughs at set points in order to continue to level up. Each breakthrough strengthened the body as well as the mana channels. As a result you could not force a new level like in the past by using double the experience points. Instead you had to reach a breakthrough and unlock the ability to gain levels again. Most of the early stages of cultivation relied upon circulating mana throughout the body, but at higher stages oftentimes certain items, herbs, or potions were needed to assist in breakthroughs.

Despite having an effective level cap when I reached a bottleneck in my cultivation, this was still far better than standard leveling practices. With the stand leveling method it would take a million experience to move from level 20 to 21, that same amount of experience could take me from 14 all the way to level 70.

All these thoughts led me to a simple conclusion. There was no point in trying to level up further. I had the highest possible stats possible for someone who started cultivating after beating the boss of the first floor. Gaining a single additional point to my states might help, but I was willing to bet it would be an equal combination of skill and luck that would get me through the next boss fight. Knowing this could be the boss and that he would outclass me in every way I decided to just lean into all my skills from the beginning.

The orc in front of the tent sat with his eyes closed. I slowly approached, watching the placement of my feet to avoid anything that would make noise. I had two daggers out and planned to throw them as soon as he started moving. Step by step, I inched closer to the orc. When I was within five feet I lunged forward with both daggers aiming for vital points.

The orc’s eyes shot open with my lunge. It had no time to make out what was happening before I plunged one dagger in an eye and the other in a throat. Learning from my last boss fight I jumped back, pulling the daggers with me as I prepared for a counter attack.

The orc slumped to the ground dead.

Enemy defeated. 500 exp awarded.

Level up! You are Level 15, +1 to all stats.

Floor cleared! Proceed through the portal for rewards!

Once more a portal appeared in the same location as the last floor.

This felt wrong. The first floor had taken me 30 days, not counting the time I spent on cultivation, and I managed to beat this floor in less than twelve hours. Did I just get really lucky with my attack? Perhaps other climbers would fail to notice that the orcs had horrible sight and could be easily avoided by keeping quiet.

As I thought about this I felt my necklace grow warm and decided to check the floor information.

Welcome to the Eternal Tower Floor 2 Hard!

Goal: Kill the Boss Enemy

1/1 Boss Enemy

Time limit: 5 days

Time remaining: 45 days 2 hours, 10 minutes*

*Overtime in effect

It appeared my Overtime Necklace multiplied the time remaining by a factor of 10 after clearing the floor.

That additional time changed everything. If I reach my breakthrough and then start killing orcs I should be able to greatly increase my level before the next floor. While I had been lucky with this boss, I would prefer to have overwhelming stats in the future. Really I would settle for equal stats. If all else was equal my fighting ability should ensure that I came out ahead in every fight.

I moved the corpse of the boss away from the tent, I then set everything up to prepare for cultivating.

***

It only took six day to break through to the peak stage. I wasted no time and hunted down the orcs and orc witches to gain experience. In less than a day I had raised my level to 20. I could have been faster but if I attacked without a plan the orc witches would shoot fireballs everywhere and would end up killing each other. Unlike on the first floor, I did not get a reduced amount of experience if I was not responsible for the kill.

It might seem heartless, but they were walking fleshy bags of experience. In other words, they were a resource. The Academy had instilled in me that no resource should ever be wasted. As such, each time I came across a group of orcs and orc witches, I carefully planned my attack so no errant fireball would get near an orc I hadn’t already killed.

The other concern I had was breaking through to the next stage. Level 20 marked the first time I would need to break through to a new cultivation level. For humans there were five cultivation levels: mortal, earth, sky, heaven, and celestial. According to the guide, breaking through to another level greatly increases stats and helps “detoxify the body”, whatever that means. Compared to the stages, cultivation level breakthroughs were much more difficult.

Knowing there was no sense in complaining about it, I sat down and chewed some of the awful jerky as I prepared for a long cultivation session of eating jerky and moving mana through my body.

***

I feel absolutely, totally, unequivocally, fucking disgusting.

I had thought I needed a bath before, but now I would sell my sister for a bar of soap.

I had broken through after 25 very boring days.

Congratulations! You have reached early stage earth cultivation. +10 to all stats.

The normal sense of elation started as soon as I had the announcement. I had a full minute to enjoy the sensation before foul black fluid started to leak from every pore of my body. The inside of a latrine smelled better than the gunk coming out of me. It saturated all of my clothing and left me scrambling to go kill some orcs just to use their furs as towels. It turned out that fur just spreaded the terrible liquid around as it clung to my body.

After several hours of scrubbing with snow, dirt, leaves, and tree bark I had most of the substance off of me. While the furs were not good at removing it from my body, they were able to pick up enough of the liquid to ruin them as clothing. Once more naked I hunted down more orcs just to replace my makeshift robe.

It took every ounce of willpower not to just immediately leave the floor and hope the next floor had a warm bath and decent food. Judging the Hard Difficulty so far, the likelihood of either good food or a place to safely wash myself was non-existent. And try as I might, I couldn’t help feeling like my diet of jerky over the past several months had contributed to the foulness of the “cleanse” my body went through.

I decided that there was no time like the present to get to leveling and rushed about killing anything I came across. Gone were any sort of tactics and planning. Instead I would rush into an area and kill everything in sight. The huge jump in my skills made it beyond easy to wipe out any group in less than a minute.

A couple of hours later I had killed everything on the level and managed to move my level up to 25. I had a little over 12 days remaining and grudgingly got down to cultivating. Knowing a clear mind would improve cultivation, I followed every trick that I remember from the manual to keep my head clear.

Congratulations! You have reached middle stage earth cultivation. +5 to all stats.

Great.

Wonderful.

Absolutely fucking fantastic.

It was time to get out of the hell off of this floor and maybe find somewhere that had water. I didn’t care. I knew people could acclimate to smells over time but something about the residual liquid on my body defied that logic.

I practically sprinted through the portal as I checked my status.

Name: Miki Meadows

Age: 29

Race: Human - Earth

Cultivation: Earth - Middle Stage

Level: 25

Exp: 0/3,200 to next level

HP: 335/335 HP Regen 2.79/min

Stamina: 353/353 Stamina Regen 2.94/min

MP: 203/203 MP Regen 1.69/min

Strength: 57

Agility: 60

Endurance: 61

Intelligence: 61

Wisdom: 51

Luck: 73

Floor 2 complete!

Rewards: Skill- Scan.