The Rest Station on the far side of Floor 15 was smaller than the Siphoner outpost, a pocket of relative safety carved into the Tower's tissue by Climbers who had come before. It had no blood vats, no crimson banners, no chanting faithful, just a handful of weary travelers resting in alcoves along the walls, their eyes tracking Elias and his companions with the usual mixture of suspicion and exhaustion.

  They found a quiet corner, away from the other Climbers, where the bioluminescent organs cast a soft blue glow that was almost peaceful. Elias helped Mira settle against the wall, checking her wounds one final time before allowing himself to sit.

  His body felt like it was made of lead.

  The past days had been a gauntlet of combat, negotiation, and desperate survival. He'd fought Stalkers, fled Siphoner patrols, operated on three dying patients with improvised tools, and installed a new Circuit that had drained most of his blood reserves. His vitality had recovered during the journey from Sero's outpost, the Tower's strange biology restoring what exhaustion had taken, but the deeper weariness, the kind that settled into the soul rather than the muscle, remained.

  Vitality: 100/100

  The number meant nothing. He was whole on paper and hollow inside.

  "You should sleep," Mira said quietly. Her own eyes were heavy, her injuries still healing, but she watched him with concern. "Real sleep. Not the half-aware dozing you've been doing."

  "I know."

  "Then do it. I'll keep watch."

  Elias wanted to argue. Wanted to stay alert, stay vigilant, stay ready for the next threat that would inevitably emerge. But his body made the decision for him, his eyes closing almost against his will, his consciousness sliding into darkness before he could form another coherent thought.

  He dreamed.

  The dream began in whiteness, an endless void without floor or ceiling, without horizon or boundary. Elias stood at the center of nothing, his feet finding purchase on something that wasn't there, his body casting no shadow because there was no light to cast one.

  "Papa?"

  Lira's voice, small and distant. He turned, searching for her in the emptiness.

  She was there, barely. Her form flickered like a candle in a storm, her edges blurring, her features shifting in and out of focus. She stood perhaps ten feet away, but the distance felt impossible, as if miles of white void separated them.

  "Lira!" He tried to move toward her, but his legs wouldn't respond. The void held him in place, an invisible force preventing him from reaching his daughter.

  "Papa, I can't—" Her voice cut out, replaced by static, by silence, by nothing. Her form flickered again, and for a terrible moment she disappeared entirely.

  Then she was back, but different. Older. Or younger. Or neither, her age shifting with each flicker, cycling through versions of herself that might have been, could have been, should have been.

  "I'm fading, Papa." The words were clear now, but Lira's mouth didn't move. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, from the void itself. "I can feel it. The connection is stretching. Breaking."

  "No." Elias fought against the invisible restraints, straining toward her. "I won't let you fade. I'm going to save you. I'm going to reach the top and find the Origin Blood and—"

  "What if you can't?"

  The question stopped him cold.

  "What if you're not fast enough?" Lira's flickering form seemed to solidify slightly, her eyes—Elena's eyes—meeting his with a clarity that cut through the dream's haze. "What if the Tower takes too much? What if saving me means losing yourself?"

  "Then I lose myself." The answer came without hesitation. "You're my daughter. There's nothing I wouldn't sacrifice."

  "Even your humanity?"

  The void shifted around them, the whiteness taking on a red tinge, like blood seeping through snow. Elias felt the Tower's presence suddenly, massive, ancient, hungry—watching them from beyond the boundaries of the dream.

  "The Tower always collects its debt," Lira said, but it wasn't her voice anymore. It was Sero's voice, cold and certain. "Every gift it gives has a price. And the price is always paid in blood."

  Lira's form began to fragment, pieces of her drifting away like ash in wind.

  "Papa—"

  "LIRA!"

  Elias woke with a gasp, his hand reaching out instinctively, grasping at empty air. His heart pounded in his chest, his breath coming in ragged gasps, the nightmare's terror still clinging to him like a second skin.

  "Elias?" Mira was beside him instantly, her knife drawn, scanning the alcove for threats. "What is it? What's wrong?"

  "Lira—where's Lira?"

  "She's right here. She's—" Mira stopped, her expression shifting to concern.

  Elias followed her gaze and felt his blood turn to ice.

  Lira hovered near the alcove entrance, her ghostly form flickering more severely than he'd ever seen. She wasn't just wavering—she was glitching, her image stuttering like a corrupted video file, pieces of her disappearing and reappearing in rapid succession.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "Papa?" Her voice was distorted, layered with static. "Something feels wrong. I feel... thin."

  Elias scrambled to his feet, pulling up the interface with desperate urgency.

  SOUL INTEGRITY: 92.7%

  WARNING: SIGNIFICANT DEGRADATION DETECTED

  PREVIOUS READING: 95.7%

  DECLINE: 3.0% IN 36 HOURS

  Three percent. She'd lost three percent of her Soul Integrity in less than two days. The decline was accelerating—far faster than the gradual 0.1% daily loss he'd calculated before. Something had changed. The stress of the Siphoner encounter, perhaps. Or the strain of their flight through the deep passages. Or simply the cumulative effect of time and distance and the Tower's constant hunger.

  "Papa, why do I feel so thin?"

  Elias crossed to her, his hands hovering near her flickering form, unable to touch, unable to comfort. "You're okay, sweetheart. You're going to be okay. I just need to—I need to stabilize you."

  He turned to the interface, searching for options.

  TRANSFUSION ALTAR: NOT AVAILABLE

  NEAREST ALTAR: FLOOR 17 (REST STATION GAMMA)

  ESTIMATED DISTANCE: 2 FLOORS

  Two floors. At their current pace, with Mira still recovering from her injuries, that was at least two days of travel. Maybe more if they encountered resistance.

  He did the math in his head, the calculations cold and clinical despite the panic churning in his gut.

  Current integrity: 92.7%. Rate of decline: approximately 1.5% per day if the acceleration continued. Critical threshold—the point where Lira's soul would begin to fragment permanently—was somewhere around 50%, based on what he'd learned from Old Tom's messages.

  At 1.5% daily decline, she had roughly 28 days until she reached 50%.

  But the decline wasn't linear. It was accelerating. If the rate continued to increase...

  Twenty days. Maybe less. Maybe much less.

  "The Origin Blood," he murmured, pulling up his memory of Old Tom's notes. "Floor 50. That's the only thing that can permanently stabilize her."

  CURRENT FLOOR: 15

  FLOORS REMAINING: 35

  Thirty-five floors in twenty days. Nearly two floors per day, through increasingly dangerous territory, with dwindling resources and mounting threats.

  It was impossible.

  But so was everything else he'd done since entering the Tower.

  "We need to move faster," Elias said, his voice hardening with resolve. "Much faster."

  Mira looked at him sharply. "Faster how? I can barely walk, and you're running on fumes. If we push too hard—"

  "If we don't push hard enough, Lira dies." The words came out harsher than he intended. He took a breath, forcing himself to modulate. "I'm sorry. But the math is clear. At our current pace, we won't make it. We need to reach Floor 20 as quickly as possible—there's a major Rest Station there, according to Tom's notes. Better resources, better information, maybe other Climbers who can help."

  "Floor 20 is five floors away. Through the First Vein."

  "I know."

  "The First Vein is the Tower's primary circulatory channel. It's flooded with blood, filled with creatures that have adapted to swim in it, and guarded by things that make Stalkers look friendly." Mira's voice was flat, stating facts rather than objecting. "Most Climbers go around it. Take the slower paths."

  "We don't have time for slower paths."

  Mira studied him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she nodded slowly.

  "Okay. We go through the Vein. But if we die in there, I'm blaming you in whatever afterlife exists."

  "Fair enough."

  Elias turned back to Lira, whose flickering had stabilized slightly—still worse than before, but no longer the severe glitching that had terrified him upon waking. She watched him with those too-old eyes, Elena's eyes, and he saw understanding there. She knew what was happening to her. She knew what the numbers meant.

  "I'm going to save you," he promised, not for the first time. "Whatever it takes."

  "I know, Papa." Her voice was small but steady. "I trust you."

  The words were a gift and a burden, a blessing and a curse. She trusted him. His dying daughter trusted him to do the impossible, to climb faster than anyone had climbed before, to reach the Origin Blood in time to save her soul from dissolving into nothing.

  And if he failed...

  He pushed the thought away. Failure wasn't an option. It had never been an option, not from the moment he'd made the choice to bind her to him, to carry her into the Tower, to gamble everything on a chance that most would call insane.

  Old Tom's warning echoed in his memory, rising unbidden from the depths of his mind.

  "Everyone who climbs the Tower loses something. The only question is whether you choose what you lose, or let the Tower choose for you."

  What had Elias lost so far? His comfortable life, certainly—his career, his home, his place in the normal world. His certainty, perhaps—the belief that he could save anyone if he just tried hard enough. His innocence, definitely—he'd killed now, harvested human blood, made compromises that would have horrified the man he'd been before.

  But what else had he lost without noticing? What parts of himself had slipped away in the darkness of the tunnels, in the blood and the fear and the desperate scramble for survival?

  He didn't know. And that uncertainty frightened him more than any creature the Tower could produce.

  "We should prepare," he said finally, pushing the existential dread aside for practical concerns. "Gather whatever supplies we can find here. Rest for a few more hours if possible, then move."

  Mira nodded, already checking her weapons. "I'll see what the other Climbers have to trade. We're low on everything."

  She moved off into the Rest Station, leaving Elias alone with Lira.

  The ghostly girl drifted closer, her form still flickering but present. She reached out with one translucent hand, miming the gesture of touching his face—a habit from when she was alive, from before the accident, from the world they'd both left behind.

  "Papa?"

  "Yes, sweetheart?"

  "Are you okay?"

  The question caught him off guard. He looked at his daughter—at her worried expression, at the concern in eyes that shouldn't be able to feel concern anymore—and felt something crack inside him.

  "I'm fine," he lied.

  Lira tilted her head, seeing through him as she always had. "You're scared."

  "Yes."

  "Of the Tower?"

  "Of failing you."

  She was quiet for a moment, processing this with the strange wisdom that death had given her.

  "You won't fail me, Papa. You're the bravest person I know." Her flickering form attempted a smile. "And even if... even if something happens... I'm glad you tried. I'm glad I'm not alone."

  Elias felt tears prick at his eyes—tears he couldn't afford, weakness he couldn't show. He blinked them back, forcing his expression into something resembling calm.

  "You'll never be alone," he said. "I promise."

  Mira returned with a small collection of supplies—a few ration packs, a water container, some basic medical supplies traded from a Climber who'd had more than he needed. It wasn't much, but it was something.

  They rested for another few hours, Elias forcing himself to sleep despite the nightmares that lurked at the edges of his consciousness. When he woke, his vitality was full, his body as recovered as it was going to get.

  Vitality: 100/100

  Blood Reserves: 3.1 L

  Soul Integrity: 92.7%

  They gathered their things and moved toward the Rest Station's exit, toward the passages that led deeper into the Tower, toward the First Vein and whatever horrors waited there.

  Lira hovered beside Elias, her form still flickering but her presence steady.

  "Papa?"

  "Yes?"

  "Are you going to be okay?"

  He looked at his daughter, at the ghost of the girl he'd loved more than life itself, at the reason he was climbing through hell with no guarantee of success.

  "I will be," he said quietly. "Once we reach Floor 20."

  And then further. Floor 30. Floor 40. Floor 50.

  The Origin Blood.

  Whatever it took.