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

The initial emergence of the tower had brought huge complications to the world.

The magical abilities of the climbers turned the tower into a source of great geopolitical strife.

Some of the earliest explorers of the tower became super soldiers for the U.S. military.

Other countries demanded the United States share the tower with others, claiming the tower was a global humanitarian issue.

The U.S. ignored these claims for many years, but after one too many tower explorers came back with incredible powers and wreaked destruction on the public, something had to be done.

In 2055, the city of Zestiris was formed. It was a cooperative project, designed and created by the U.S. Congress and the United Nations.

The city was a way of controlling and tracking those who went in and out of the tower. The rule applied to information as well.

“Interesting,” said Max.

“Glad to hear you think so,” said the girl. “Most people aren’t interested in the history of information management, or as it is more colloquially called, information studies.”

They kept walking further through the stacks of books.

“Are some of these books from other floors?”

The girl stopped and turned back to smile at Max.

“Some are and they are the most fascinating!” she said. “A lot of them are in the restricted section though, but not all of them. A lot of them aren’t written in English or any Earth language, but there have been a few translations. Pretty cool, isn’t it!?”

Max wasn’t as enthusiastic about it as the librarian, but he did think it was pretty cool. Not only did this place contain vast amounts of human knowledge, but it even contained knowledge from other floors in the tower, from entirely other worlds.

They kept moving, until eventually the girl turned down between the stacks of shelves.

Max followed behind, coughing from the dust swirling in the air.

“Here you go,” said the librarian girl. She pointed to a half empty shelf with a few dusty books. “Here’s our small collection of books on the endless forest. Happy researching!”

The girl then left Max alone in the hall of books as she returned to her spot at the front counter.

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.

Max scanned the titles of these more general books. He started pulling out books that had memoir in the title.

He returned to his desk with a new stack of thirteen books. He pushed the six he’d brought out before to the side and got back down to work.

He started skimming through them, looking for that one piece of information, that one nugget, that one clue that was going to help him further his goals.

He put the first three books down fairly quickly. He was reading through the memoirs of famous or semi-famous tower climbers. It was pretty obvious within the first few pages how much time they spent discussing the endless forest, which usually either amounted to one sentence or nothing at all.

He continued reading.

Halfway through his stack, he picked up a book that was most likely the oldest one in his pile. The pages were brown and crumbling. It was full of dust and it smelt old.

He cracked it open.

The Travels of Rem the Merchant translated by Esther