Sakura looked him in the eye with an angry suspicion. “This isn’t ramen. These are tower noodles.”

“Look,” she said, picking up her chopsticks, and picking up a piece of meat. “This is snow wolf meat. That’s an animal that only exists a few floors up in the tower and nowhere else.”

Max looked at the piece of meat that seemed indistinguishable to him from a piece of cooked beef with newfound awe.

He picked up his chopsticks, cracked them apart, and then dug into the bowl of noodles.

After one bite of the snow wolf meat, his whole face lit up.

Sakura grinned. “I know, right?”

They both then turned their attention squarely on their bowl of tower noodles and started to devour it.

Max took one last sip of the remaining broth in his bowl and then placed it down.

He turned to Sakura. “So how do animals and monsters work in the tower? Like we were able to eat this snow wolf meat, but something tells me we couldn’t eat a shield slime—not that I know why we would want to, but I don’t think we could even if we tried.”

Sakura nodded. “You’ve half figured it out. As you’ll learn once classes at the academy start and you actually enter the tower, tower monsters when defeated drop monster cores and usually a few coins. Whereas an animal that lives in the tower after being slain will remain in its bodily form, as would a slain animal on Earth. Its body can be used for all sorts of things: from its bones to its skin to its flesh. Tower monsters don’t exist in the same way.”

Max sighed. Floors, worlds, tower monsters, and tower animals.

“There’s so much I still don’t know about this world.”

“Get used to it, mister,” said Sakura. “Part of being a tower climber is to be always venturing further into the unknown. But boy, do you got a lot to learn. Like—let’s go over the fight today.”

“I thought you said I did a good job,” said Max.

“You did,” she said. “But that’s not to say, what you did wasn’t insanely risky either. You had no way of knowing that the energy shield had to be destroyed and then followed up with a second attack. Had the shield slime’s ability functioned a little differently, as in, the same attack that shattered its energy shield was able to continue its attack, then that attack from Samuel would have killed you.”

“Are you saying there was a better way out of the scenario?”