“All very reasonable questions,” she replied. “After the battle, the healers were able to cure you of your wounds, mending your legs back into shape. When they were healing you, they discovered an invisible inscription on your back—in outer-rim terms, a curse—and when they removed it, it returned the feeling to your legs.”

“But shouldn’t I need physiotherapy or something? People don’t just go from unable to walk to suddenly swinging their legs off hospital beds.”

“Normally, in the case of someone having a fractured neurological link in their spinal cord, that would indeed be the case. Except that wasn’t the case with you. You had a cursed inscription on you. Once removed—normal neurological activity simply resumed as normal.”

“If it’s so powerful, how were they able to remove it?”

“You can thank yourself for that. It was your kokoro passive skill that ultimately broke a piece of your inscription, letting you access your trait.”

Max sighed. He was overwhelmed by all of this. At first, he could make sense of it, but then new questions kept popping up.

“But I thought—” He couldn’t piece the words together. “I thought I was injured in a car crash—”

In fact, he knew he was. He remembered the flames of the wreckage. Blood dripping down his parents’ heads.

Sakura paused, thinking for a moment.

“I don’t have the answer to that question,” she said. “I truly don’t. Your case history doesn’t line up with the fact that you have a trait or a profile or any of this. All I can say is the more time you spend in the tower and the tower-zone, the more mysterious unexplainable things happen. Maybe someone knows what they all mean. The tower gods perhaps, but I certainly do not.”

Max looked Sakura right in the eye and the woman looked away. He believed she was telling the truth about not knowing why all of this was happening to him, but he got the feeling she was still holding important information from him.

She suddenly clapped her hands.

“Now Max,” she said. “I know you probably have more questions for me and you can ask me more in a bit, but it’s important that I ask you a few questions now.”

Max nodded.

“Somehow, you’ve ended up in the tower-zone. More than that, you have the potential to make an excellent climber one day. Would you like to be a citizen of the tower-zone? Would you like to become a climber?”

Max’s heart raced.

The chance to become a climber.

Never in a million years did he think such a possibility would ever be offered to him. He had long ago accepted that only the life of a scholar or archaeologist might get him close enough to the tower so that he could enter and search for his sister one day.