There were six books on the shelf about the endless forest. Max grabbed them all and then walked over to a large wooden desk in a designated study area and got to work on his research.

Max picked up the first book. It was called, Mapping the Endless Forest: The Road Between Two Teleporters.

Max opened the book and scanned the pages. He’d learned long ago that you didn’t have to read for research in the same way you might read a novel. Unlike a novel where you might treasure every sentence and word, research was like an archaeological dig. You skimmed through the words looking for signs of treasure and only then did you zero in and focus on the area to dig into.

The first book was an incredibly boring on the scholarship of map-making, cartography, and the design of the signs that would help climbers from getting lost in the endless forest.

The most interesting thing were the statistics about how many people died on that floor in humanity’s earliest days of climbing the tower. The monsters overwhelmed climbers who were just getting used to their new powers. Some people went up and immediately suffered from tower sickness, dying due to a lack of mana affinity. From what it sounded like, the earliest days of the tower were a horrible bloodbath of trial and error.

As Max read, Sakura’s words echoed in his mind: all these rules are in place to protect you.

She was right.

Even worse, people had died for such lessons to be learned, for such rules to be put in place.

He eventually put the first book down and started skimming through the second.

The second was a bestiary of the forest floor monsters. Most of it was variations on the types of monsters he’d already seen. Even more discouragingly, none of the monsters listed were above copper rank.

He kept researching for another couple of hours until he decided to break for lunch.

He spent some of his newly earned coppers on a coffee and panini at the café across the street from the library.

He sat outside and enjoyed his coffee and sandwich while watching the city go by.

He thought over what he had found out about floor-2 over the course of his morning’s research. Basically, it came down to one thing: climber society pretty much did not care about the floor at all. It was merely seen as a stop gap between floors. That was why so little was written about it.

Then a light bulb went off in his head and Max quickly finished his sandwich and coffee and started heading back to the library.

He went back to the shelves that the librarian girl had taken him to and studied the other books. The section was organized by books written about each floor. But if you went the other way, you’d find more general knowledge books about the tower overall.