Max had no recollection of being here in this room, which made him very uneasy. He had no memory of bathing himself in this magical water either. So, if he’d never been here before, how come he had an unlocked profile and trait like the others?

Max kept the question to himself. Sakura had warned him: he needed to be cautious about who he talked to about his history.

Max and Casey walked around the fountain and followed the instructor through a small foyer that led to another chamber.

This chamber had a glowing bright white circle in the room’s center.

The light was all-encompassing. Max felt a strong draw to it.

The instructor stood in front of it, stopping the students from getting any closer.

“This right here is a teleporter,” said the instructor. “Think of it like a magic elevator. If I stand in the center of it, I can ascend to many floors of the tower above this one. But—I am I, and you are you, and that’s important to remember here. Since none of you have gone to the floor above this one, you can only ascend up to the second floor.”

“But why does that even matter?” Max asked. “If we can go up to the second floor teleporter, couldn’t we then just choose to ascend to the floor above that one?”

The instructor smiled. “If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, every floor of the tower functions like a test or a level in a video game. You need to prove to the tower that you’re strong enough to ascend to the next floor. How does the tower achieve that test? By having two teleporters on every floor. The one we’ll enter at is known as the floor-2 arrival teleporter and the one that will take you all to floor-3 is called the floor-2 departure teleporter. You can only visit floor-3 once you find that second teleporter. Then, when you’re on floor-3 you’ll need to find the floor-3 departure teleporter to ascend to floor-4. And so on. The good news is: once you’ve reached one of those higher floors, you can ascend to their arrival teleporter from any other arrival teleporter you visited. Pretty nifty, huh?”

“You said that was the good news,” asked Casey. “What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is: many climbers have died while searching for a floor’s departure teleporter. Some floors are as vast as entire worlds and finding the departure teleporter can take months to years, sometimes even longer if it’s a floor so high up that no Zestiris climber has ever discovered the departure teleporter’s location.”

“You mean a floor that our climbers haven’t climbed beyond?” said Cyrus.

“Oh believe me, kid,” said the instructor. “There’s a lot to this tower that even the best of us still don’t understand.”