He ignored the level up notifications when he reached the safe room. It was marked safe room according to his map ability, and he guessed it was because he did not have to fight or take any challenges in this particular room. All in all, it should have taken him about two days of subjective time to complete the first floor. He needed a bit of rest before he chose his next floor.

  He didn't know what he was going to choose but his current choice was ‘not red’. Certainly nothing earth themed at the very least.

  He frowned as he stared at the doors. There were four this time. Did they increase by one every floor he climbed? He wasn't quite sure. The new colour was black. He frowned. The door was made of some sort of matte black metal, as was the wall immediately around it. The black gem on the knob shone though, inviting him to investigate its mysteries.

  He decided he'd think about it when he woke. His stamina and endurance weren't high enough that he could go whole days without sleeping and face no consequences.

  He wasn't hungry when he woke. That had him frowning a little. He had thought about this earlier, during the boss fight, but had had no time to make conclusions. Even as a mental projection in Aeon, he had been eating. He had not known he was a mental projection though.

  He looked up in thought, and that was when his eyes found the matte black door with the shining black gem. He had decided he'd examine it more after his rest.

  He put his non-hunger on the back burner for now.

  Studying the door told him nothing. The metal, when he hit it, sounded like very ordinary iron. Plain old iron. Not even a hint of steel or any other alloys. Black painted iron.

  He tried to look at all the other familiar colours. This time the red door was wooden, although it was more of the sculpted wooden doors of indoor rooms of normal houses from back on earth. In fact, all the other doors were wooden this time.

  One was a nature themed door made of creeping vines twinning together and shaping themselves into a barely regular rectangle. The other was a large ornate door made from thicker wood. It was half of the huge wooden gate-like doors that led to most houses of worship.

  The black door was the only off theme thing about the safe room . He was curious about it. He couldn't take his eyes off that onyx eye. Its gleam was emphasized by the dull metal surrounding it.

  That was when Rafe started to suspect the tower was being manipulated.

  “I'm going to regret this, aren't I?” He asked the ceiling below which he stood.

  He pushed the black door open and passed through the threshold.

  There was a light far in the distance, similar to the one in the mermaid room. He tried shedding his eyes to see better. That was when he noticed the ring of fiery glyphs he was standing in.

  Their light grew by the second, and in moments he began to feel a slight disturbance in his very soul. Rafe tried to take a step, to escape the magical formation. His leg met an invisible barrier. It was as unyielding as a wall.

  “A bit unfair to put a trap in the entrance, isn't…it?” he said, gritting his teeth as the discomfort grew to pain in the last moments.

  The pain disappeared as suddenly as it had come, and the glyphs exploded into tiny sparks that quickly burned themselves out into tiny motes of ash.

  He was trying to examine his body when the light far ahead disappeared as well. The room around him was bathed in an all pervading darkness. He couldn't see a single thing. It was even worse than the underwater room.

  His eyes were open and he couldn't see anything.

  ‘Ding’ Side quest received.

  Objective: Learn the cost of power.

  Floor objective received.

  Hone your aura.

  He could see the blue screen somehow. He thought of using it as some kind of torch but… Somehow it wasn't touching the darkness at all. He remembered something Liam had said about it not being physical, and therefore a mental construct that no one could get the details of unless Rafe let them somehow. It could not produce light for him. He didn't have such a skill anyway.

  He read through the objectives of the room. Hmmm? Floor objectives? Not room objectives, he thought with a frown. And there was no reward inserted this time. Rafe cursed inwardly as he went to try and push his race ability further out than usual.

  That was when he noticed it wasn't giving him any information.

  ‘Ding’ The longer you stay on the floor, the more skills and abilities will become unusable. Even your stamina and mana pools will be severely restricted the longer you stay. Good luck.

  Once more he wondered what the actual role of the quest system was. Was it a kind of guide to surviving dungeons? Was it more?

  He opened his map ability. The two screens appeared, one showing the tower and the other just a black canvas. There was a red spot on it though.

  “That must be me,” Rafe said, excited.

  He zoomed out, trying to see the edge of the floor. He couldn't find it.

  “Maybe I'm too far away. I guess I'll have to walk for a while before it can show the edges.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  With nothing more to do, he started to move blindly.

  That was when the first of them came to him. He heard it squeak before he felt its claws. He cried out in pain, belatedly remembering he was climbing a tower. There were enemies on the floor. And he was blind as a bat. He didn't even have the mana sensitivity he had come to disregard recently.

  As he snapped out of his fugue and prepared to defend himself, Rafe heard more squeaks coming from deeper in the darkness.

  “Shit! I think I'm supposed to use my aura somehow? To sense them?” The floor objective had said something about mastering his aura.

  He could only use his aura to sense things like bloodlust, mana and strength. Mana types, sometimes relative strength of an individual compared to him, that sort of thing. Telling him to use his aura to sense beasts he couldn't even begin to identify was asking for too much.

  Still, he pushed his aura out wide. Flung it wide more like. This was one of the few things Noid had worked with him on. He'd taught him to retract his aura especially in public. He'd taught him to send a few tendrils of aura every once in a while instead of releasing the whole dam.

  Rafe had always had a potent battle intent. He hadn't known it was because he had leveled the skill fifteen times the usual cap.

  Sending out all his aura was not the good thing he thought it was. There had been about ten, maybe twenty, beasts chattering before. With his aura blanketing almost ten metres around him, hundreds, thousands of beasts started to chatter.

  Rafe retracted his aura like he'd been stung.

  “Ah…I think that was a mistake?” he said as he moved his head around nervously, trying to stare into the dark.

  When the noise of thousands of beasts charging his way started. Rafe had his sword out before he could think better of it. He felt the bonus stats his blessing gave him, felt his heart beating faster. He was not supposed to use his sword, but he also wanted not to die as much as possible.

  “Huh?” Rafe asked not even ten minutes later.

  He felt wet and sticky, the air smelled metallic and it felt misty. There was no more chattering. It was quiet. Rafe had killed all the thousands of beasts yet he had gained only a fifth the essence he got from killing one floor boss.

  The monsters were weak. Pathetic. They might have been level five or less, from what he could see. Why would a higher floor have weaker beasts? Rafe could feel the frown on his face.

  He looked at his map ability again. He did not see any difference no matter how much he looked. A red dot on a black page. Nothing, not a damn thing different. Then he saw something on the ability. A purple dot was moving toward him.

  He sent a tendril of aura into the darkness, trying to use this new dot to find directions. He found something as he combed the area around him. But then the chattering started again. This time less than ten had sensed his aura.

  He killed them all, and unfortunately the purple dot seemed to have been one of them. So, at a certain range his map could display the presence of living beings. The question he now had was at what range, and how did it do it?

  Now that it had come to it, Rafe was forced to resort to the only clue he had. This was a training scenario. A scenario to teach him to make better use of his aura. His skills gave him a unique advantage, he knew. Being uncapped as they were. His aura was probably at the level of a peak rare aura already, despite being basic.

  Could he improve it further? What would the aura skill be able to do once it evolved? Was he getting the maximum benefit from it even now? Liam had told him the effects of his skills were not to be underestimated.

  The map could sense things from a great distance. The beasts on this floor could sense when he released even the tiniest bit of his aura. What was he missing? What was he supposed to learn?

  “From the beasts… they're weak. I could crash them without my class. Even with half the stats I had just after the trial. So…”

  Then he remembered that his stamina and mana pools were going to be restricted at some point.

  “Ah. I'll need to still be able to fight even without stamina, and I can't well fight a level forty boss under such constraints. Or can I?”

  He touched his chin, wondering if the challenge was a burst just because he wasn't going to struggle at all.

  It wasn't long after that thought that his map screen became blank.

  “Shit! I was hoping they couldn't hack my status,” he cursed.

  He could still access everything else, but the former map screen only showed a blue screen. Empty.

  He needed to start taking the trial seriously. He had realised something while he hunted the weak beasts on the floor. Their auras were impossible to sense unless his aura senses touched their very body. That might have been because they were weak, but Rafe doubted that.

  These monsters just might have been his intended teachers. They could sense aura even with their own auras retracted like that.

  Besides, if he couldn't escape, couldn't see anything really, wasn't it the perfect time to experiment with his new ability. Sam had been right about the eye giving him an ability to see souls. She had told him he should get some time in the tower to use the ability so he was used to it by the time he reached the top. She had said something about his mimic ability too, but Rafe wasn't sure he was qualified to learn any of that.

  He looked inside himself. And he forgot to breathe for an instant.

  It was like the most beautiful painting, or pair of paintings painted on opposite sides of the same canvass. He'd rather call it a curtain though. One showing his skills and the other showing his stats, he assumed.

  He could see what Sam had described. The green fire that was his life force. The bright white conflagration that twisted around and fed thousands of small pillars. That was the essence circulating into his stats and attributes. In his distant view it looked like a painting of pillars of light stretching towards some unseen heaven.

  When he got closer though, he realised that calling it a curtain didn't do it justice. Each side of it was a world unto itself. Like the void, in fact. So like the void, like Sam had said. He could step into the curtain and see where all the pillars of light were anchored and were they touched the sky. An endless expanse of nothing.

  But this side of the curtain was not why he was here today. Today he wanted to see the orange sun and its surrounding stars. He moved closer to the class structure first, to the weird structure that was his Pseudo-class. Then he studied the blue tinged abilities. He had never gotten around to asking about how the two were different.

  Still, he studied the swirling outlines of faded essence. Essence built the skill structures, the class structures, and thereafter disappeared. He could see the structures weren't so simple though.

  “Are those glyphs? Runes? …enchantments?” he said with a frown.

  That was a scary thought, if he thought of everything everyone here liked to imply. With a shake of his head he ignored that for a moment.

  It was time to work on his aura manipulation skill. Now, he only needed a way to identify which one it was. He thought about it for a bit, then just decided to use the skill. One of the blue stars, a collection of glyphs, shone for a second, and all his attention turned to it.

  At some point, he'd have to visit each and everyone of his other skills because as Liam had once said none of them knew the skills’ limits.

  He took a deep breath and got ready for the approaching monsters.