Sorin Atharel, rank 100 climber, goes to sleep on the final floor of the tower and wakes up groggy and disoriented back in the city that makes up Floor 0. It clings to the outskirts of the tower, only its outer wall keeping the hungry void at bay. He finds himself thirty years younger and, even more strangely, reset to rank 0. All of his soulprints are gone, his soulspace has been constricted down to nearly nothing, and a new tile mosaic fills the floor of it. It depicts him approaching a doorway, and it’s his only clue as to what happened.

  Separated from his companions, he immediately stands up and starts moving. His next discovery is another shocker: the blue granite walls of the tower are red now. The city itself is different, and while he could dismiss that as faulty memory, the tower itself being changed indicates… Sorin has no idea what that means. The only thing he can do at the moment is start climbing again while he searches for answers.

  His thoughts are interrupted by a trio of rank 1 climbers looking to drag him up to Floor 1 to be used as a pack mule. Sorin declines, and when they get aggressive, he drops them and steals their money. With some funds to help him get started, he seeks out the Climber’s Society, an organization he was part of the first time he climbed the tower.

  What he finds in its place is the Climber’s Union, which fulfills an almost identical function, but charges membership dues and various fees that make it prohibitively expensive for new climbers to avail themselves to the Union’s services. Sorin’s stolen purse isn’t flush enough to afford him a spot in the Union, but the attendant tells him about a back alley unofficial organization affectionately known as the Meat Grinder that helps new climbers.

  Going there, he discovers a small market where he purchases his first new soulprint, Ice Dart, and an old, beaten-up sword. The owner, a retired rank 10 named Bradford, helps Sorin find a new team. There are three of them—Nemari, a fire mage and their leader, Odric the healer, and Rue, a scout and dual-wielding blade specialist.

  They are initially unimpressed at Sorin’s lack of gear and the quality of his sword, but after he handily smacks them down in a three-on-one duel, they agree to tackle the Floor 0 portal guardian together. Sorin dominates that fight, too, granting all of them access to the portal hub that allows them to ascend to Floor 1.

  The transition doesn’t go smoothly, with the portal spitting them out directly into a monster den. After winning that battle, they set out to find monsters to farm. They quickly find a cliffside colony of harpies nearby, which they proceed to slaughter for a few days, netting a Flare soulprint for Nemari to empower her fire spells and Pierce for Rue, to help penetrate thick hides and other armors.

  While exploring and looking for the Floor 1 portal hub, they are attacked by a swarm of warbler frogs. Their dangerous, hypnotic croak leaves climbers wide open, and the team flees rather than attempting to overpower the monsters. Soon after, a manticore finds them. Its surprise opening salvo takes Nemari down and ties Odric up with healing her to keep her alive.

  Sorin and Rue kill the manticore, harvest several powerful soulprints from it—Including a powerful physical enhancement soulprint called Warrior’s Vigilance—and then Sorin goes looking for a cause. He quickly discovers the trio from Floor 0 has found them and has been baiting monsters in their direction. Just like the first time he encountered them, they’re easy to defeat. This time, he doesn’t leave them alive.

  While looting their cave base, he discovers a strange sign carved into the wall: a circle with seven straight lines evenly spaced and running horizontally through it. When he touches it, black inky darkness starts spilling out. It quickly shapes itself into a voidling, the antithesis of anima that powers all climbers’ soulprints.

  Voidlings aren’t like normal monsters. They eat all forms of magic and consume the anima of anything they touch, making them deadly adversaries. Sorin kills it quickly, then leaves the cave. He doesn’t know what called the voidling to that symbol, and he doesn’t want anything to do with it.

  When he explains to the rest of the group about the trio and how they were pulling monsters down on them, Nemari is angry at Sorin for causing so much trouble. Even though it wasn’t his intention, he almost got her killed. The team collectively agrees to end their first hunt there and makes their way to the portal hub to split the loot and decide if they want to keep working together.

  Sorin returns to Floor 0 and spends some of his hard-earned money to join the Climber’s Union. With access to part of the archives, he learns what they know about Floor 1. His own knowledge is outdated as the terrain and monsters are all mixed up from what he remembers. Meanwhile, Nemari reaches out to her family, who are also climbers, to try to confirm some of Sorin’s story about being a higher ranked climber who got reset. They tell her that it’s impossible.

  She confronts him about it when he gets back, but he’s unwilling to tell anyone that he’s from another tower for fear that he’ll attract the attention of people too powerful to be defied while he’s still so weak. Knowing that they’re talking about him outside the team only solidifies this stance.

  Despite reservations, the first climb was too lucrative to resist a repeat performance. The team heads back out into Floor 1’s wilderness, where they begin a farming operation that’s quickly interrupted when they discover a ruin. Rue gets tricked inside, and the others chase after her. The ruin closes behind them, leaving them stranded.

  The whole team is attacked by a swarm of giant rats, almost killing Nemari again. They are saved by another group of climbers, but that team’s leader—a man named Yoru—wants them out so he doesn’t have to share the tower-forged loot he’ll receive for clearing the ruin. That isn’t an option at the moment, unfortunately.

  While looking for a place to hunker down and wait, Sorin gets separated from the rest of his team and attacked by another swarm. Part way through, his soulspace expands to rank 2. This should be impossible as far as he knows, and is yet another mystery to throw onto the pile. Soulspaces only rank up when killing floor guardians normally, but Sorin puts the extra space to good use and empowers his soulprints.

  He finds Rue shortly thereafter, who tells him the other half of the team is safe. They work together to finish the ruin as quickly as possible, eventually meeting Yoru’s team as they are challenging the ruin’s guardian. Sorin and Rue help kill the guardian, preventing Yoru’s team from needing to flee, and Sorin claims a Tremor Sense soulprint that he combines with a visual acuity one he bought back at the portal hub to create Blind Sense.

  They leave to let Yoru’s team to find the ruin seed and collect the loot, but there they luck out. Whilst walking, Rue senses a knot of anima and leads Sorin to it. They break the seed and loot the tower-forged cache, which includes a piece of slate inscribed with the same symbol Sorin found in the cave.

  The whole group is satisfied with their gains and decides to travel directly to the Floor 1 portal guardian to challenge it. They get there without incident, but when fighting the monster—a prodigiously thick-skinned wolf that breathes poison shadow mist and summons smaller wolves to assist it—they’re ambushed by two voidlings that keep Sorin from helping fight the guardian.

  Yoru’s team interferes, having tracked them across the floor to confront them about the supposed theft of loot. His team catches up in the middle of the fight and jumps in to help. Both teams working together successfully defeat the floor boss. Sorin’s team takes the portal to the Antechamber between floors.

  Sorin gets separated from them again. The rest of his team has a normal Antechamber with their floor rewards, but Sorin gets a mysterious pedestal with seven towers on it. The blue one glows from top to bottom, but the red one has a small sliver at the bottom only, matching his climbing progress. The other five towers are completely dull. In the center is the symbol from the cave and the slate, which moves itself to settle into place. A new soulprint appears in the middle of his mosaic called Liminal Gateway, which lets Sorin walk a path through the void outside the tower and connect to anywhere he’s placed the symbol.

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  Sorin uses the liminal path to leave the Antechamber, where he finds the rest of his team desperately fighting for their lives against a warren of berserker jacks. The monstrous rabbits inflict massive damage on the group, including breaking Rue’s ribs, before they’re put down. Due to the number of injuries, they decide to go straight for the Floor 2 portal hub.

  Once there, Nemari spots a man named Jorn, who is part of a team that Rue works for as a street-level member of the most notorious gang in Floor 0. They’re called the Black Hellions, and they’re how Rue was able to get her hands on a powerful aura sensing soulprint as a rank 0. She rushes back to let Rue know her handlers are looking for her, leaving Sorin to his own devices.

  Sorin, unaware of exactly who the man is, goes about his business of ordering custom armor from a leatherworker, to be enhanced with alchemical lacquering. He’s gathered the ingredients needed, everything but the leather itself, which he’ll get from a nearby colony of nightmare bats.

  The hunt for the bats is interrupted by Jorn, the Black Hellions handler. It turns out he’s actually looking for Sorin with orders to recruit or eliminate him. Being rank 5, he’s confident he can easily overpower a fresh rank 2. That confidence gets him killed.

  Rue’s secret association with them comes out, and Nemari is upset to learn that she’s been spying on everyone as well as reporting on climbers at the Meat Grinder. Nemari leaves to go talk to her family and see what she can find out about the Hellions, and Sorin follows soon after to pay the Union archives another visit so he can plan a route for Floor 2.

  He gets the knowledge he’s after, but Black Hellion thugs corner him there. In an attempt to avoid a fight, Sorin sneaks away and uses his new Liminal Gateway to escape the archive without being seen. The gangsters find the sign, remove the panel from the wall where he carved it, and give it to their leader for unknown purposes.

  Sorin gets back to Floor 2 and discovers that Nemari has abandoned the team. She’s learned that the Black Hellions are led by a climber who’s at least rank 20 and has an unhealthy interest in Sorin. She recommends Rue and Odric also leave Sorin to his fate. They ignore her advice, and the three of them set off on Sorin’s pre-planned route. His armor isn’t ready yet, but he plans on using Liminal Gateway to come back and get it once it’s done.

  They travel to an old fortress, its construction a mystery of the tower. There, they hunt the gremlins infesting it for anima and the chance at soulprints. Their work is interrupted by a massive ogre with skin like stone. Sorin is injured in the battle, but they prevail thanks to a combination of Rue and Odric’s soulprints allowing them to poison it. Odric claims a Stone Skin soulprint from it, and Sorin’s soulspace expands again to rank 3.

  While Sorin recovers, aided by Odric’s healing magic, they make a semi-permanent camp beyond the fortress. Sorin leaves to collect his armor, but returns a few hours later critically wounded.

  It turns out Nemari didn’t abandon the team. Her own family drugged and imprisoned her because Samael threatened to kill them if they didn’t assist him in finding Sorin. At the same time, Sorin had collected his armor commission and returned to Floor 0 to resupply. He stumbled across Nemari being transported by her family and attacked to free her.

  The fight resulted in some severe injuries, including his arm being broken and twisted completely around. By the time he escaped from the higher ranked climbers, he was barely coherent. It takes a lot of healing to get the story out of him, but Rue and Odric do eventually piece together the details.

  They leave to meet Nemari at the rendezvous area, which takes a bit of effort to find since Sorin wasn’t able to give her good directions. The team reunites and presses deeper into Floor 2’s wilderness, now fugitives who don’t dare show their faces at the portal hubs.

  Samael shows up in Nemari’s home to threaten her uncle and the rest of her family. When Uncle Nat tries to stop Samael from going after his son, Samael cuts off his arm. Then he takes the son anyway and forces him to lead a group of Hellions to the spot where Sorin disappeared. They find the Liminal Gateway sign there.

  Before they get there, Sorin ventures through in an attempt to secure the owner of the Meat Grinder’s help as a fence and quartermaster to sell their climbing loot and buy supplies and gear. He is successful and sets up a dead drop location and schedule. When he tries to carve a new sign to use Liminal Gateway, it fails. It’s only after he returns to the original one that he suspects the Hellions have something to do with it.

  He kills the three Hellions in the alleyway where his sign waits for him to access it. The fourth Hellion is an apparition of Samael himself, able to see and converse, but not to act. He reveals that he knows Sorin is from outside the red tower, that he himself is from the orange one. He wants Sorin to team up with him, stating that the local climbers will never be good enough to keep up with people like them. Sorin refuses him, destroys the sign to break Samael’s hold over it, and flees across the city to set up a new one.

  The team proceeds into an anima forest where Nemari’s fire spells can be used to good effect. Sorin’s contributions are limited due to his broken arm, an injury beyond Odric’s power to properly fix. Sorin has his own plan to heal it by free casting a D-ranked healing spell once his soulspace grows enough to allow it.

  Their hunt goes well, except for an annoying lack of soulprints. Odric makes up for it by harvesting some of the innumerable herbs and reagents in the forest, but that just translates into money, not power. They can only hope their new fence comes through with procuring some of the soulprints they’re looking for.

  One night, the team is attacked by an area-wide sleep spell. Sorin resists it long enough to get a look at the heart witch attacking them, but succumbs before he can kill it. When he wakes up, he’s in a clearing miles away surrounded by dozens of monsters and three witches. They have been commanded by their ‘god,’ known as the Creator and believed to be the tower itself by humans, to give Sorin a message.

  After sprouting some cryptic phrases, none of which he understands, they depart. Sorin makes his way back to his team, wakes them up, and leaves the forest before the uneasy truce between man and monster ends with the rising sun.

  They shift their hunting grounds again, this time to some foothills not too far from the Floor 2 portal guardian. The area is infested with goblins and hobgoblins. The team attacks multiple camps, killing the monsters to help max out the power of their new soulprints, and after defeating a second stone skin ogre, Sorin breaks through to rank 4. He heals his arm, then absorbs three new soulprints he was holding onto, resulting in a significant power up.

  He returns to Floor 0 to get his last round of supplies for Floor 2, only to be attacked by a pair of powerful voidlings inside the liminal space. This raises yet more concerns about the nature of the tower and the void, but he has more immediate problems to deal with first.

  With the team about as strong as they can get, they decide to challenge the portal guardian. Defeating it isn’t the problem. The real concern is that the Black Hellions have been searching for them the entire time, and that they’ll have people watching the portal guardian since it’s the only place they can be sure Sorin will have to go eventually. This fear is well-founded.

  Rue’s handler and his team are indeed camped out near the portal guardian. Sorin devises a plan where Nemari, Odric, and Rue attack the guardian while Sorin ambushes the Black Hellions. The plan is partially successful, but Sorin’s guess as to their hiding place is off, and the Hellions split into two groups before he can reach them.

  Raf and a rank 10 earth mage attack the main group, leaving Sorin to deal with two more rank 10s and a rank 6 using an intelligence-gathering build. That one isn’t much of a threat, thankfully. Killing the two rank 10s burns through all of Sorin’s anima reserves, meaning that by the time he finishes his battle, he’s got nothing left to help the rest of his team.

  Raf severely underestimates how much Rue has grown, and when she overpowers him, he orders the earth mage to kill the portal guardian to induce rank up shock in the team. Using that opening, the mage captures all three of them in cages of stone. Sorin arrives, having torn open the wall of his soulspace to make it bleed anima just so he can keep fighting.

  Raf isn’t a threat to Sorin, but the earth mage is. Thankfully, he’s almost as exhausted as Sorin, and Odric provides a distraction by breaking out of his cage. Sorin takes the opening and kills the earth mage while Raf peppers him with poison needles. Rue hurls her sword through the bars of her own cage, skewering Raf and killing him.

  Since Sorin didn’t participate in the fight against the portal guardian, he can’t take the portal to the Antechamber with the rest of his team. They leave without him, not having a choice since they can’t return to the main portal hub and use that portal to travel up to Floor 3. Sorin solos the floor guardian a few days later to gain his own portal up.

  Inside the Antechamber, he’s rewarded with a strange, obviously magical sword with ties to both the blue tower and the void. Sorin questions the tower, hoping that in the Antechamber, he might get some answers. The tower remains silent, and Sorin renews his vow to keep climbing until he finds his own answers.