Tower Climber (A LitRPG Adventure, Book 1) by Jakob Tanner (free children's online books TXT) 📕

the boy and continued her duties in cleaning up the now-defunct arena following the police raid.

Max felt horrible.

He bought the ingredients for bacon and egg ramen on the way home with some of his winnings from the arena.

But Sakura wasn’t home when he got back.

He waited around for a couple of hours, but she seemed to be working late.

He paced the apartment, his head filled with guilt.

He stopped in front of the windows of the city. He looked at the glittering lights along with the looming silhouette of the thick never-ending tower at the center of the city.

Two out of the three kids he followed died today.

They had been just like him: eager to grow in power and willing to do anything to accomplish it.

He thought back to how when he was following them, he had thought the tower-zone wasn’t that different from the outer-rim. That it was like any other city.

He was realizing now, however, that that wasn’t the case.

This city with its tower that granted humanity incredible powers. It didn’t enrich the lives of the people here.

No.

It made them more violent, meaner, and, most of all, crueler.

He opened his pouch and looked down at the three monster cores he’d earned that evening. Two copper cores and one silver core.

He didn’t feel like draining their mana today.

He would the following morning.

More than that, he needed to figure out a way to get stronger within the parameters that he was allowed to work within.

He was now determined to figure out how to do so.

44

Max woke up the next day to an empty apartment. Sakura had left early for work and had pointedly not said goodbye.

She was clearly still mad at him.

Max wasn’t sure how to fix the situation, but he figured if he kept training within the rules of the tower-zone, she would eventually get over it.

He rose from his bed and got ready for the day. When he was finished, he sat on the living room floor and drained the mana from the monster cores he’d won from yesterday.

He drained the copper monster cores with ease, though the silver monster core required a bit more energy than he expected to drain it of all of its mana.

He fell back on the floor both exhausted and euphoric. The new mana rushed through him and he felt the mana channels and vessels throughout his body tensing as they grew a little bit stronger.

After a few moments to catch his breath, Max eagerly checked his profile to see how much he had gained.

Name: Max Rainhart

Rank: Unranked

Trait (Unique): Mimic. Unleash the last move you were hit with at double the power.

Strength: 8

Agility: 7

Endurance: 7

Mana Affinity: 7

Passive Skills:

Kokoro (Warrior Spirit)

Max grinned at the information in his profile. His mana affinity had jumped by three points from four to seven. The silver monster core must have helped him achieve such a significant boost as it had proven difficult to even to get minimal gains in his mana affinity stat before then.

Seven in mana affinity, huh?

Max was pleased with himself. He didn’t even need the number to tell him that his mana affinity had increased, he could feel it in his body. He could sense the life force and energy running through him.

The other thing that pleased him was his strength stat had gone up by one point. It must have been a reflection of all the battles and trials he’d been going through.

And just like the greater sense of mana flowing through him, he could feel the tightness of his biceps and other muscles.

If he looked at himself in the mirror, it was hard to believe only a month and a half ago, he had been such a scrawny twig of a teenager.

He got up off the floor with a new enthusiasm for life and tried to think what he should do next for his training.

The most obvious place to go was up to floor-2 and work on improving his stats by hunting down monsters in the endless forest.

And he would. Eventually.

But more than working harder, he had to work smarter.

So he was going to do what any nerdy kid who had grown up without a lot of friends was best at: hit up the library and read some books.

“Nice to see you again,” whispered the cute librarian he had spoken with last time he visited. “Can I help you with anything?”

“I had a question for you,” said Max. “I’m looking for books on floor-2 of the tower, the endless forest. Do you got any?”

The girl made an odd expression and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

Max worried he had maybe done something wrong, like in the way he had upset Casey the day before.

“Did I say something wrong?” asked Max.

The girl shook her head quickly. “No, it’s not that,” she said. “I’ve gotten a lot of weird requests from library patrons before, but no one has ever asked for what you just did.”

“Really?” Max asked, shocked.

He guessed that many climbers were probably more eager to train on higher floors that floor-2 was easily forgotten, but it seemed like a pretty big miscalculation on their part.

The librarian girl got up from her desk and walked out from behind her counter.

“If you’d follow me, please,” she said in her soft voice.

Max followed the girl as they walked deeper and deeper into the library.

Max stared in awe at all the books they passed.

“Were these all written by writers from the tower-zone?” he asked.

“About forty percent of the collection is,” said the librarian. “The library contains a substantial amount of writing from the pre-tower era. It was only after the formation of Zestiris in 2055 that the knowledge protection act was put in place and the flow of information between the tower-zone and the rest of the world began to halt.”

Max nodded along to the fascinating information. Over the years that he’d lived in the outer-rim, he’d spent a lot of time trying to learn as much of the history of Zestiris