Caen soaked contentedly in a pool of water as he made some plant tendrils on the wall beside him writhe. The water was very pure, and Caen had found that the pools here seemed to clean themselves somehow and had a rejuvenating effect on his skin. Parthra was no doubt behind all this. His clothes lay drying on the floor.

  He was now able to tell the time, and in a Plane, for that matter. Caen had found a golden pocket watch with neat filigree patterns in his bag of holding, along with a short note from Yildriv, thanking him for his help in a rhyming scheme.

  The pocket watch could work in Planes fine enough, and it allowed him to now keep track of the hours as they passed by. Yildriv’s gift had warmed Caen's heart. With this, he would no longer need to bother Zeris or Guinevere for the time.

  It’d been an entire day since he arrived on the third layer. Just as Caen was considering stepping out of the pool so that he could practice more complex Flora spells with his new Flora affinity, a doorway opened in the wall beside him.

  Caen quickly rushed out of the pool, and as he put on his mostly dry clothes, he wondered what about anything he'd been doing just now warranted Parthra’s favor. He grabbed his bag and made his way up to the fourth layer.

  * * *

  Caen made it to the fifth layer that same day. He'd been meditating on Parthra's soul structure while casting spells when yet another hole opened up in the ceiling above. Fortunately, this was a low cavern, so climbing wasn't too difficult.

  The next hole, however, appeared on a ceiling about a hundred feet above him. He'd taken to sleeping in lower caverns in the hope that Parthra would only open there, but while he'd been gathering fruit in a cavern with particularly juicy-looking variants, it happened.

  Whenever Caen held onto the vines on the wall he wanted to climb, they'd suddenly go limp despite being quite firmly attached to the wall. No mundane climbing for him, it seemed. This was a test of his proficiency in Flora magic, and Caen was more than happy to oblige.

  He'd stopped Mimicking his vine even though it was much better at manipulating the other plants in this Plane. However, his own Flora affinity was surprisingly stronger and came with passive augmentations, which the vine didn't have.

  Caen spent hours climbing the wall. This required him to chain spells and stack several modifiers. He hadn't gotten a lot of practice doing this in Flora magic; most of his experience with spell chains was in Spirit-healing.

  He looped his vine around his torso and directly manipulated it between the nest of vines and the wall. Then he manipulated other vines to wrap around his limbs as well. All these he used to slowly and very carefully haul himself upwards.

  He fell a few times, but fortunately, he could always catch himself in the surrounding vines, and they didn't go limp whenever he did. He didn't fear injury, as that wouldn't happen here in Parthra. He just didn't want to lose the progress he'd made.

  It was slow and very challenging work. At one point, he stopped to retrieve some food from his backpack while he recovered some of his mana. The mana density here in Parthra was the best he'd ever experienced.

  What would erecting a gathering array in here be like? A distant part of him mourned the fact that he hadn't thought to explore this place sooner. All the training he could have done, and he didn't even need a Valiant certification to enter.

  A few hours later, he finally made it into the sixth layer. He'd needed to continue hauling himself up through the hole that Parthra had made in the ceiling.

  Days passed like this. Caen worked on refining his spellcasting in Flora. He continued learning how to manipulate ropes with the aid of spell chains and far more modifiers than he'd ever applied in this discipline.

  Caen was able to interact with a great many of the rope fibers at the same time, making manipulation much smoother. He wrapped the rope around his arms and wound it all over his body. His finesse wasn't yet at the level where it would serve him in a combat situation, but this was already leaps and bounds above what he, in abjection, could do before now. Though, of course, none of this was particularly useful for his climb because Parthra only permitted the use of plants from the Plane.

  He examined soul structures, particularly Parthra's. With Soul-sense, he could see a second cord of connection that ran between his vine and Parthra. The frail secondary cord was an incomplete and ephemeral shadow that eluded his attempts at understanding it.

  He noticed something else while observing fragmental dryads: those who'd earned fragments. Whenever they shaped portions of Parthra, two affinity clusters would grow prominent in their soul structures. Flora was expected. Vibration, however, had surprised him. When he asked a dryad about this, she'd simply smiled and told him to finish his climb first.

  While working with a boosted Body-enhancement affinity some weeks back, Caen had realized that if he didn't want to be sore or expect to be sore after workouts, he wouldn't be. After confirming this from others, he pushed himself harder than usual every other day. And even when he couldn't find a Body-enhancer to Mimic, he'd resort to cranking out more sets with his bodyweight.

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  Caen felt himself basking in the atmosphere here, practicing magic, challenging himself in new ways, slowly growing stronger, and working on problems that were not life-threatening.

  This stood in stark contrast to the less savory parts of his time in the Odaton Plane. This was what magical power was for: doing what made you happy while being able to protect yourself and loved ones from danger. That resonated deeply with him. Parthra was the perfect example of an ideal that had started to form in his mind.

  The entry points into higher layers came quickly and found Caen at the most unremarkable times. He'd wake up and find a hole yawning above him, or he'd be running through his physical routines or just practicing Flora spells.

  They did grow in complexity, though. Each one required him to use Flora magic in innovative ways, which wasn't saying a lot. There was little else to it but the manipulation of existing plant matter.

  One hole had taken him almost an entire day to traverse. It was a large, winding chute that required him to pull himself upwards with vines for hours and hours on end. He stopped several times to recover some of his mana, and whenever he did, he had to firmly brace himself against the walls with vines, lest he slide all the way back to his starting point.

  Another hole opened several hundred feet in the ceiling above while he was taking a quick bath. This one turned out not to be as challenging as the chute has been.

  By the eleventh layer, he got to meet more active climbers. Many of them had been here for months, and most of them spoke languages he didn’t understand. The dryads, however, had an uncanny ability to communicate in many languages and tended to bridge communication barriers.

  On this layer, there were several instances of carefully cultivated flowers and shrubs on the walls and ceilings. Denizens busied themselves trimming these into ornamental shapes and alien glyphs. These paired well with the bioluminescent lights, creating interesting effects.

  Caen met a very friendly and charismatic bard in a large bar. He went by the name Gam and was of Spovish origin. With unnaturally curly blond hair and a black beard, he always walked around in a black leather coat that had crystal studs all over it.

  He mainly played a strange, multi-stringed instrument and was impossibly adept at Vibration magic, capable of producing notes that boggled the mind. It all sounded as beautiful and compelling as soul structures did.

  Sometimes, the world briefly drained of color whenever the man played his instrument, and this reminded Caen of something Magister Fermien had done with Passionfire months ago. Caen and everyone else he’d spoken to described being consumed by an inexplicably euphoric buzz for hours each time they listened to Gam play.

  He was definitely an archmage.

  Gam’s performances, which took place just about anywhere, usually involved other musicians and storytellers, which made for a truly inspiring experience. Caen had even sat with a group of them and joined in playing a twirling string and wind instrument that required as many as sixty hands.

  The strangest thing had happened. He'd known exactly what notes to play, how best to do it. He was in such perfect sync with every other instrumentalist there without prior coordination. It made him shudder.

  Later, while Caen studied the work of a group of dryads who were shaping a section of Parthra's bark to make space for some shrubs, a hole opened in the wall beside him. A good number of the denizens cheered excitedly for him, and Gam showed up from nowhere, playing his instrument, as Caen walked through.

  A vast chasm, unlit by Parthra's bioluminescent light, hung between him and another landing. Caen was baffled at the size of this place. The tree didn't seem to be hollowed out, but it had so much space.

  He manipulated his vine to wrap around the vines and branches hanging from the ceiling above. Any of the surrounding plants that he touched with his hands drooped or just fell to the ground below. He had to use his own vine to carefully make his way across the chasm.

  He was certain he would be fine if he fell, but what would that mean for his progress so far? Would Parthra let him continue from the eleventh floor, or would he have to restart his climb? Caen focused all his attention on not falling. Once he reached the other side, he found a flight of stairs. He'd never been so glad to use one in all his life.

  Caen had been keeping track of what he'd been doing each time Parthra granted him access to the next layer. He sought to find a pattern, but it all seemed random. Parthra was clearly judging him, using metrics that Caen was not privy to. So he just continued doing exactly what he'd been doing.

  He studied soul structures: Parthra's, those of the dryads here, the symbiotic plant matter, and his own while casting magic. He observed, as an outsider, the casual and unconstrained practices of the denizens of Parthra. He practiced Flora spells, opting for variety and switching between his own Flora affinity and his vine’s.

  By the time Caen got to the fourteenth floor, only five days had passed since he'd arrived on the third layer. Caen had kept this detail to himself as he ascended. In truth, he had spent nearly four weeks on the second layer, which meant that his climb had only begun in earnest less than a week ago.

  He sat by a pool meditating on his soul structure while still connected to Parthra. This was a few hours after he'd finished his morning routine—using the local time on Saffron was easier for him to track than Parthra's days-long, day-night cycle.

  People had regaled him with tales and lore about how access to the fifteenth layer, which was the culmination of the climb, usually took a very long time to earn. He had only been here for less than twelve hours, but on the previous layers, he'd met climbers who claimed that they'd come down from the fourteenth layer to see if reascending granted them enough favor to make it into the fifteenth.

  Caen wasn't sure what he'd do if weeks passed while he waited. He'd given himself a deadline of no longer than two months to spend here. He needed to return to Drenlin to continue his preparations for the Patronage trials, which were only a few months away.

  If it takes me more than a month to access the fifteenth layer, I'll wait just a little longer. Maybe I—

  A hole appeared on the wall across from him.

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