There was a sort of city that clung to the outskirts of the tower, a crumbling, sprawling thing, huddled low to the ground as if it were afraid of the deadly spire looming over it. Once upon a time, the city had a name, but nobody remembered what it was. Everyone just called it Floor 0 now. It was the home of those too weak to climb, whether they were too young, too old, too poor, or simply too tired.

  Sorin Atharel hadn’t been to Floor 0 in forty years. The day he’d set foot in the tower at the tender age of fifteen was the last time he’d seen the city. But four decades of life and death, of struggle and blood and making hard decisions, hadn’t been long enough to erase the memory of that smell.

  It was desperation, or maybe despair. Probably, it was a whole lot of both. It reminded him of being a child, of being too weak to fight, of being hungry and knowing the only thing he could do about it was hope a climber had donated some meat to the House of Mercy.

  Why am I thinking about that place now? he wondered to himself as he stirred from slumber, his eyes still closed. We’re about to do the impossible and conquer the top floor. I should be focusing on that.

  He took a deep breath and started to stretch, but it was all wrong. He wasn’t remembering the stench of Floor 0, he was breathing it in. His eyes snapped open and he tried to leap to his feet, only to find his body sluggish and slow, weak in a way he hadn’t been in decades. Some kind of mind trap! But why didn’t Clarity of Mind protect me?

  He’d invested heavily in that soulprint, knowing it was the only thing keeping him safe from a hundred different monsters that could prey on a weak mind. It had never failed him, not once in the twenty years he’d been feeding anima into it. It should be working even now to wake him up from a memory of his childhood, but somehow, all he could see were ramshackle huts full of holes and stained with mud.

  “You alright, kid?” a quavering voice asked from nearby.

  Sorin nearly jumped out of his skin at being snuck up on like that. He spun in place to see a man around his own age, mid-fifties, but unlike Sorin, he was frail and thin, with sallow skin and wispy strands of hair. His face had the hollow cast of a man who couldn’t even remember what a good meal tasted like, and his hands shook as they gripped the rough wooden cane planted in front of him.

  “Kid?” Sorin echoed.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. You’re no kid. You’re big and grown up and you’re gonna get your first soulprint any day now.”

  Sorin tore his eyes away from the old man and looked down at his own body. Hands that were smooth and unlined greeted him. Gone were the puckered white scars from where a bloodfur jackal had bitten him on Floor 14. Gone were the swollen, knobby knuckles, the stark blue veins, papery skin, and the gray hairs.

  Impossible. I’m… young?

  He ran a hand across his face and felt only smooth cheeks and lips, not a hint of his beard to be found. Even his hair was full and thick again, though he’d need to find a mirror to confirm it had returned to its former black luster instead of the salt and pepper gray he’d grown used to in his forties.

  If I’m young, why do I feel so weak?

  “Look kid, if you wanna stand around in an alley feeling yourself up, that’s your business. But do you mind taking it off to the side? That’s my door you’re blocking.”

  With a start, Sorin realized he was standing in front of a hodgepodge of a door, really more three chunks of wood lashed together with a length of old, frayed rope. “Sorry,” he murmured as he stepped to the side.

  The old man gave him some side eye as he ambled on past. “You’re a strange one. Better get to a main street a’fore you meet one of the Bats. They find someone who don’t belong here, they’ll rob you blind and beat you half to death.”

  The thought of some Floor 0 street gang threatening him brought a laugh to Sorin’s lips. “I think I can take care of myself, but thanks.”

  He needed to find somewhere private so he could get a look at his soulspace. Something was obviously going on, and if Clarity of Mind was functioning properly, that meant he’d actually been transported back to Floor 0 somehow, possibly stuffed into some poor sucker’s body. He’d never heard of a body-swapping soul attack before, especially not one that could transport a person a hundred floors straight down, but if he wasn’t trapped in a mindscape prison, he had no clue what else could have happened.

  “Suit yourself, kid. Don’t come crying to me when they catch you,” the old man said. He slipped into his shack and yanked the ill-fitting door closed hard enough to wedge it firmly into its frame.

  Now alone in the alley, Sorin took a quick look around and then risked bringing his mind inward to view his soulspace. Awareness of the outside world faded away and he stood in a small room made of seamless black stone. It should have stretched on and on, a thousand feet wide and four stories tall. It should have been awash in color from three dozen soulprints painted against that perfect black like constellations in the night sky.

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  Instead, it was empty and blank. There were no soulprints, not Clarity of Mind, not Inferno Heart, not even the simple Dodge he’d gained on Floor 1 and fed enough anima into that it had grown into Preternatural Reflexes. His soulspace was completely empty, four decades of work vanished like smoke from a campfire.

  The only thing there at all was a strange tile mosaic stretching across the floor. It depicted a single scene, that of a man walking through water coming up to his knees, hand outstretched as he reached for an open doorway filled with light. It was delicate and beautiful, a million shards of color, each no wider than his pinky nail, the kind of work that would take months and months to complete.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he whispered to himself as he stared down at the only feature left in his soulspace.

  The scene called to him, tugged at his memories somehow. That doorway was so familiar, but he couldn’t place it. The more he struggled to force his mind to reveal the truth, the harder it got to hold onto the elusive threads tangled up in his head.

  Sorin wanted to sit there and stare at the mosaic until he figured it out, but it wasn’t safe. Being in his soulspace meant he was completely disconnected from the real world. Someone could walk up to him right now and put a knife in his ribs, and he wouldn’t realize until he fell over dead. If the old man was to be believed, he was in the middle of hostile gang territory, not a good place to stand around defenseless.

  He pushed his mind back up out of his soulspace and opened his eyes. Nothing had changed in the thirty seconds he’d been gone, which was both good and bad. He was still alive, but he was also still stuck on Floor 0, completely powerless and with nothing but the clothes on his back. I ought to be grateful I didn’t wake up naked.

  He was wearing heavy canvas trousers, a thin shirt, and a decent pair of boots. There was no pack, no rations, no supplies, and no weapons. The only advantages left to him were a lifetime of memories of climbing the tower and the fresh vitality of a man in the prime of his life. Based on what he could see of his own body and what he felt of his face, he guessed his age had been reverted to somewhere in his mid-twenties.

  That’ll just have to be good enough. I already did the impossible once; how hard can it be to climb back to the top again? Plus, this time, I’ve already got a bunch of high-ranked climbers for friends who can help me figure this out and get back on my feet.

  The first thing to do was figure out what had happened to his party. If they’d been sent back to Floor 0 like him, then he needed to find them. If not, he needed to know if they’d finished Floor 100 without him. They’d better not have, not considering he was the linchpin that made everything work. After four decades of work, if the others didn’t wait for him to catch back up so they could conquer the tower together, he’d strangle them.

  Sorin started making plans while he walked, everything from what soulprints he needed to find to where to farm anima to empower them to who to speak to when he got to the Floor 0 branch of the Climber’s Society. It had taken forty years to get to the top the first time, but he was betting he could do it in less than five now.

  Getting started would be the hardest part. Somehow, Sorin would have to convince someone that he was who he said he was when by everything he knew, that should be an impossibility. His soulprints were so entwined with him that trying to remove any single one of them would almost certainly kill him, never mind all of them. That wasn’t even accounting for his soulspace somehow shrinking from a rank 100 to a rank 0, or the fact that his body had regressed three decades.

  But he had the passwords to his accounts, so money wouldn’t be a problem. If he had to settle for some subpar soulprints for the time being, that was alright. He’d ripped out plenty of weak ones when he’d just been starting out after experimenting with them. Sooner or later, he’d get back to a floor where he’d regain access to all his contacts and resources, and from there it would just be a matter of putting in the work.

  Sorin finally broke free of the maze of winding streets and back alleys. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but he’d forgotten just how tight and cramped everything was in the old boroughs of Floor 0. It was freeing just to be able to stretch his arms out and not have his hands press up against rotting wood.

  And I didn’t even have to fight anyone, he thought with a self-satisfied smile.

  He glanced up into the sky to orient himself. The tower itself was in the very center of the city, a huge spire of foreboding dark blue granite with veins of gleaming silver running through its walls. The Climber’s Society had a headquarters nearby, which included the bank vaults containing what would be considered vast sums of wealth for a rank 0.

  Only, when he spun a slow circle and finally spotted it, it wasn’t the tower he remembered from his childhood. Sorin could accept that the city had changed in all the years he’d been gone, that he’d woken up in an unfamiliar slum with no knowledge of how he’d gotten there. But the tower itself?

  It was rust red, still granite, but in a completely different style. Small spines, relative to the massive size of the tower, jutted out at various angles, and instead of gleaming silver veins, it was accented with heavy, brutal iron bands. It was somehow heavy and thick, nothing like the elegant spire he’d looked up at every day as a boy.

  “Impossible,” he said.

  It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be real. The only explanation was that he was still on Floor 100, that he’d encountered something so powerful, it had overwhelmed Clarity of Mind completely. He needed to find a way to break out of the mindscape before it was too late.

  Sorin turned to run, but didn’t make it more than ten steps before he bumped into someone and a powerful set of hands grabbed his arms. “Watch it, jerkoff,” a harsh voice snapped.

  “Huh?” He looked up and saw he’d accidentally run into a climber, rank 1 by the feel of his soulspace. Two other men flanked him on either side, probably the climber’s party, and they quickly shifted to place Sorin in the middle of their formation.

  “Dumb as shit, but plenty strong,” one of them said. “Might be just what we need.”

  “He’s rank 0,” the smaller one objected.

  “So? Not like we need him to fight, just carry the haul.”

  “True,” the man Sorin had bumped into said. “Congratulations, jerkoff, you’ve just been promoted to bag carrier.”