Chapter 54
You are now the Keeper of the Towers.
As the Keeper of the Towers, you determine who of the material plane has the character and moral fortitude to make them worthy of ascending into the heavens. For fulfilling this duty with excellence, you earn Tower points. You can spend Tower points to grow and improve your towers.
Tower points are earned daily based on excellence in the following:
-Number of Adventurers
-Total Monster Levels Slain (Adjusted for Difficulty)
-Volume of Adventurer Blood Spilled
-The Smoothness of Difficulty Curve
-Quality of Ascenders
Improve in a category to increase total TP earned.
Current Daily TP Gain: 2,421
Rigel Tower Core
Keeper: Brenin of Borja
Level: 1,709
Available TP: 22,005,806
Daily TP Gain: 2,421
Progress to Next Level: (37,757,315 / 999,999,999)
Status: Networked
Solara and I stood in a humble study, likely belonging to the tower designer at one point. After I finished in the statue of the Goddess, we found the core on a pedestal at the top of the stairs. While Solara investigated the books on the shelves, I put my focus on the core.
Thus far, tower cores seemed to more or less mirror the functionality of dungeon cores. Celestials put more stock into silly ideas like character and morals, but modifying the tower, spawning monsters, and unlocking new options worked exactly the same for towers as they did for dungeons.
My daily TP gain was painfully low compared to what I earned in Grubiit and Flowst, but that wasn’t surprising.
At present, only members of the Silk ran the tower.
Prior to our arrival, the towers had sat unused for centuries.
Daily TP gain had likely been zero in all that time since no adventurers attempted to ascend.
I initially assumed that “Networked” was the celestial equivalent of “Tethered” for a dungeon core.
Tethered meant the dungeon core was locked into the confines of its respective dungeon.
If you removed it, the core became untethered.
All of its functionality remained, but it could no longer earn new DP.
Most conflicts with Demon Lords seemed to conclude when their untethered cores ran out of DP, but that was an educated guess on my part.
No historian had ever learned as much about cores as my party.
When I opened the tower core menu, I realized my assumption about what Networked meant might be wrong:
Status
Construction Menu
Spawn Menu
Unlock Menu
Travel
Network Menu [unclaimed]
Dungeon cores didn’t have a “Tethered Menu,” and tower cores didn’t have a new chapter option. I clicked into the Network Menu.
Claim control of all towers to access their cores remotely? Note: Changing Keepers remakes towers in their image.
Yes / No
Interesting. I had skimmed right over that detail of my new title. The system told me I was the Keeper of the Towers. Plural. Dungeon cores only made me the “Dungeon Lord of this dungeon.”
Of course, I wanted to control all of the tower cores, so I clicked yes. Now, when I opened the Network Menu, I could access another 6 tower cores.
Once I quieted my giddy laughter, I explained everything I had learned thus far to Solara.
“The differences make sense, philosophically,” she said. “Demons celebrate the individual. From what we’ve seen, celestials value conformity. One Keeper as opposed to a bunch of Dungeon Lords aligns with that.”
“Did you notice any changes just now?” I asked.
Solara shook her head. She ventured downstairs for a few minutes and returned.
“The 101st floor looks exactly the same.”
“From what I can see in the core, none of the other floors look different either. They all have the same spawns we saw during the climb.”
“I wouldn’t say that’s ‘in your image’ whatsoever,” Solara said with a light giggle.
“Definitely not. I’m tempted to travel to the other towers, but I’m hesitant to teleport blindly like that.”
“I support that level of caution.”
“Yeah. I have a lot of reading to do, but at a minimum, I have at least one more army-maker under my control. We just might win this war.”
Solara hugged me. “We were always going to win.”
“Are you here, Master?” Purity asked in my mind with her telepathy.
“Yes? Where are you?”
“At the exit. Are you and Solara alright?”
“Perfectly fine. Why?”
“The tower changed, and we didn’t know what that meant, so Podni and I came to make sure you were okay.”
“Changed how?” I asked.
“I’m not sure I can really explain it. If you come back to Sanctuary, you’ll see what I mean.”
I looked at Solara and spoke aloud. “Did you hear all of that too?”
She nodded. “Shall we have a gander?”
“This is definitely in your image,” Solara mused. We stood in the statue garden on top of my castle with Purity, Podni, and several dozen followers.
The tower’s invisibility illusion was gone. Though I never got to see what it looked like before, I always imagined the tower as sparkling white, built in a style that matched the opulence of the lobby and the 101st floor.
Now that it had been remade in my image, the tower was a giant erection thrusting into the clouds.
No, not a giant erection. My giant erection.
It was like a Byron’s Blessing had been scaled up to be impossibly large while keeping all of the details that made my dick mine.
The skin color matched. The veins were in the right places.
The shaft had a slight curve. The clouds hid the tip from view, but a clear day eventually confirmed that the recreation was exact for that portion of my dick as well.
I couldn’t confirm it at the time, but I suspected that every tower on the material plane was now visible and fashioned to look like cock. That news took a bit to reach us, but I was right. Enormous copies of my dick appeared all around the world in remote, difficult-to-reach places.
My shafts rose out of deep ocean and impassable mountains and deadly deserts.
As our research had suggested when we first began the search for towers, all of these dicks were in incredibly isolated parts of the world.
That meant only Sanctuary got the up close and personal introduction to the new look.
For everyone else, they spotted a new dick-shaped structure in the far distance.
I’m sure some of them denied what they saw for a time, and I wished I could have witnessed their expressions as they got closer and closer, slowly grasping the full scale of my manhood.
“I prefer the tower this way,” Purity said, her eyes still taking it in.
Abby appeared among us. “Apologies, Master, but we have reports that a demon army has appeared in the northern lands and is moving in our direction. They are likely to reach the mountains within the next 3 days.”
Ah, right. I wanted to keep the location of Sanctuary a secret from everyone, Abaddon included. An erection with a footprint of 16 square miles was hard to miss.
“Have all of our preparations been completed?” I asked.
“Yes, Master.”
“Good.” We were as prepared as we could be. Now that we owned 7 tower cores, I dared to believe victory was certain.
But I had to be cautious. Hubris could easily present itself as optimism. The war was far from over, and Abaddon was still perfectly capable of defeating me if I gave him the right opportunities.
A summoner on the plane of dominions invites you for an audience. You cannot receive or deliver harm for as long as you remain within the summoning circle, and you may return to your home plane at will. These rules cannot be broken or cheated by either party.
Do you accept the invitation?
Yes / No
Good news spread quickly. Arcturus was the only celestial I knew who lived on the plane of dominions and had the resources to summon me directly. I felt pretty damn optimistic in that moment.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to my girls in the garden and selected Yes.
I appeared on top of a familiar white tower. Arcturus’ colossal form stood on a platform on the other side of a void of stars.
He didn’t speak. He simply stared down at me with his empty eyes.
“Yes?” I asked after several seconds of uncomfortable silence.
“Return my belongings, human.”
“Belongings?”
“Do not feign ignorance.”
It hit me. My army had been in the process of securing and searching the archangeli city we didn’t flatten. Arcturus heard about us finding his warehouse of contraband before I did. I wondered what was inside.
“You knew before you summoned me that I wasn’t giving up any of my loot. Do you have something else to say, or was that it for your agenda?”
“How many innocents must die before your bloodlust is sated?”
“The war can stop today if the seraphim are willing to bargain,” I said.
“Such a thing will never come to pass.”
“Then, to answer your question, we have six more planes between them and us. The angeli were smart and negotiated peace. If you want to spread the word, the same terms are available for all celestials, regardless of their home planes. We can slaughter our way to the plane of seraphim, or the people in between can negotiate peace. At which point, all they have to do is hold the doors open for us to pass through to the next plane up. Then we’ll leave the doors open so they can ascend again. ”
“I can deliver this message for you for the right price,” Arcturus said.
“Name it.”
“Never reveal my connection to the items you found. I will hate you until the end of time for what you’ve done to me, but I can shoulder that shame if you agree to this.”
Now I really wished I knew what was in that warehouse. I was negotiating half of this deal blind.
“If my message reaches rulers on every plane, the seraphim especially, then I have no problem keeping your secrets.”
“How long do I have until you link the heavens to the hells?” he asked.
That thought hadn’t occurred to me yet, but I could immediately understand Arcturus’ concern.
Putting one end of a gate at the bottom of a dungeon and then a second gate on the top floor of a tower would take me mere minutes.
Once I did that, demons could pour into the heavens at their leisure to spill more blood in the never-ending conflict between the heavens and the hells.
As it was now, the demons buying property in the kingdom of Naos had to go through several checkpoints to get from the hells to the angeli plane.
The gates weren’t wide open, but they could be if that’s what I wanted.
Arcturus was right to be afraid of that. He was wrong to admit that to me. I’m not sure how long I would have needed to see that possibility on my own.
“48 hours,” I answered.
“Very well. I accept your terms.”
“Excellent. Then your secrets are safe.”
I appeared back in my castle garden.
“Are you alright?” Purity asked.
I nodded. “Very, but we have a bunch of treasure to sift through.”
“In the towers?”
I shook my head. “The archangeli plane. I have a feeling that we’ll find something good.”