Following the almost incessant march of the old drunk, almost because he had to stop at a tavern to remind us that he is, well, an old drunk.
And shortly after that we marched forward again to the so-called tower, which is supposed to be our base for a while. I just hope that when we get there we have time to accumulate a decent amount of Ki, I feel like I've been walking helpless since the attack on the cultists.
After two hours of walking, we saw the said tower, having the shape of an octagon made of shiny black stones and having eight floors, each floor is thirty meters high, but each floor is smaller in diameter than the one that serves as a base.
There are also several windows on each floor interspersed, one wall having them and the other not, this interleaving is done on each floor so that there are no two windows directly on top of each other.
We approach the tower calmly, more or less calmly in fact, Baha and I almost try to run to the Tower to check that it's all he said, but as soon as we try to quicken our pace Kaz forces us to keep up with him through Synchro.
Quietly, for lack of choice, but now that I thought I'd better enter the tower without causing a scene is probably better.
"Stop!" shouts a man in baggy clothes who was leaning against the wall beside the entrance gate to the Tower. "Identify yourselves, and what your purpose is."
'How conceited, to use a tone of order in possible guests, instead of asking politely.
As we approached I could see the gate in more detail, being two large violet wooden doors that seemed to have a gradient effect with three shades of purple and a golden metallic frame, on the violet wood were painted several constellations, and where the light hit the wood the violet turned blue giving an ethereal air to the gate.
"Kaz" The old drunk says "and I'm here to do my job again"
"Can you confirm that?" The guard, watchman, well who knows what the function of this sloppy is? Ask Kaz.
"Call the Stargazing Master, he's my confirmation." This doesn't sound like a good idea, but it works.
"And who would you be to use the founder as confirmation?" The sloppy guard asks offended.
"The guy who saved his life and made all of this here possible." Kaz speaks imitating the guard's offended tone.
"Huh? How come I never heard of you then?" the guard asks.
"I'm glad you've never heard of me because if you had the old star I sure would have gotten rid of you." Kaz speaks with a smile from tip to tip of his lips making a beheading gesture with his fingers.
"What do you mean? Would the master kill me if I knew about you?" The guard asks with a mixture of offense and doubt.
"I'm not kidding, get someone to get that old man out of his study, he'll understand as soon as he hears my name." Kaz responds, calmly this time.
"I'll get the message across Kaz, you better be telling the truth." The guard speaks pointing a ring with a blue gray lapis stone to the top of the tower.
In my sixth sense I perceive a slight ripple spreading through the atmosphere, a way to send messages without letting others see what it's about, huh? This tower is already starting to interest me.
After a minute a man jumps out of a top floor window, doing nothing to stop acceleration, dropping straight down as if he had just jumped a step on a small ladder. When the man gets close to the ground a blue light expands below his feet and pushes him slightly upwards, the light disperses and the feet of the man, who I imagine to be the Stargazing Master, touch the ground without even lifting a finger. little dust.
"Kaz my old friend, one more century without seeing you and I would have a funeral for you." Says the Stargazer Master, with a genuine smile despite the sarcastic tone of the words.
The Stargazer, can be described as the opposite of the old drunk's messy style, straight black hair, long blue and violet robes with gold embroidery, a sharp face with sharp angles giving an air of scholarity and sparkling blue eyes.
"Is that something you say when you see an old friend again?" Kaz asks, not showing any discomfort with the question actually.
"Considering your tendency to create a myriad of enemies wherever you go, I consider this a reasonable doubt." The Stargazer responds with a relaxed smile.
"Bah, whatever, you didn't mess with my room, did you?" Kaz asks, it seems they consider this exchange of almost offensive questions to be a compliment.
Bunch of crazy.
"More or less, I had to relocate some things, but I still have all your documents and tools in storage, if you want to come back to work here I can get you a room until tomorrow. Is that okay?" Ask the Tower Master.
"Perfect, find a place for these two too, they will be my assistants." Kaz responds with a smile, which by some miracle doesn't make him look like he's planning on brutally killing someone.
"You, using assistants?" The Stargazer Master asks, raising an eyebrow slightly, "What's the catch? Are they fugitives from some conspiracy or guardians of a secret treasure?"
"Something like that." Kaz speaks raising and lowering his shoulders.
"You should have kept hiding you madman." Stargazer speaks, with a look of disbelief and a nervous twitch in his left eye.
When the conversation of the two old monsters is over, let's ignore that I almost yelled 'How do you know that?' when the Tower Master gave examples of what sorts of trouble the old drunk gets into, we entered the tower.
In the center of the floor is a spiral staircase with an amber color that goes to the top of the tower, and to the bottom as well, like an hourglass with the proportions reversed.
Around the stairs was a gap ten meters in diameter, with a few golden pillars here and there, around this gap there were walls that separated the rooms, one advancing towards the gap and the other retreating.
I think this kind of interleaving is the theme of the place, even more than stars-
I think about this when I end up looking up and see the space map of 'Expanding Horizon' one of the eleven solar systems, sometimes called the 'eleven known worlds' and also which the planet we are on is part of.
"Do you like it? Each floor of the tower has a map of a world painted on the ceiling, most are in the order they were discovered. Unfortunately at the time we didn't have the funds to make eleven floors so the last three worlds are painted on the basement floors. " The Stargazer Master asks with the proud smile of an artist displaying one of his finest creations.
"I did, but does that mean there are three floors underground?" I ask.
"No, there are eight, partly out of symmetry and partly because I never believed there were only eleven worlds." The answer this time is from Kaz with a discreet smile and the look of someone savoring the nostalgia that this place brings him.
"So you think it would be sixteen worlds?" Baha asks, looking carefully at the map.
"No, even more." Kaz responds instantly.
"How many then?" Baha asks again.
"I don't know, maybe thirty." Kaz replies with a mischievous smile "My office will probably be downstairs to hide me, mind if I go take a look?" Kaz asks the Stargazer Master and pointing a finger down.
"Feel free." And the Master responds without thinking too much.
"And you two want to see what from this humble tower?" The Stargazer changes the question for us.
Humble? Where?
"Before that, if three of the floors below are for the known worlds what is on the other five?" I ask the Tower Master.
"Maps of five worlds not known or that at least no force has revealed they have discovered." The Stargazer Master speaks with a smile that isn't a smile, as if he's hiding a threat behind that answer.
'Be careful what you say and what you ask.'
It must be something like this considering the nature of the tower as a research facility, which tries not to be drawn into conflicts of power and interest.
"Want to see the other floors?" the Master asks, erasing any and all menacing air from his mannerisms.
"That's fine, i think." Baha answers for both of us.
Did he come to realize that this was a veiled threat?
Maybe, maybe not.
We started to climb the stairs to the second floor.
"Why that hollow space in the middle of the stairs?" Baha asks looking at the center of the stairs "or is it just aesthetics?"
"Some of our members can't contain themselves when they develop the ability to fly so we left this space for safety and convenience."
Security with a giant hole in the middle of the building?
It's okay that the stairs are wide and the handrails are high and firm, but these are two things that don't usually go together.
"Obviously we have a device on the bottom floor underground that absorbs the impact if someone falls."
Ohh. That's the 'safe' part. Thinking about these nonsense we finally got to the second floor. Overall it's the same thing as the first floor, only with the map being different, and in the half-heights of the ceiling having simplified drawings of men and women with black skin such as obsidian and tribal tattoos radiating each of the colors of the visible spectrum of light.
"I've wanted to ask since I saw the paintings on the first floor, what are those golden lines between the planets supposed to represent?" Baha asks looking at the map and obsidian people, almost hypnotized.
I look at the map and see the golden lines connecting the seven planets arranged in orbit around the sun.
"You never left this planet, right Baha?" I ask him.
"No. How does that relate?" He answers and asks back.
"Everything. These golden lines represent the 'Cosmic Bridges' relics of the time when exploration of other worlds was just beginning and the only way for ordinary people to cross from one planet to another." I start the explanation.
"Excuse me miss, I don't want to be a buzzkill, but it's more accurate to say that the three original bridges are relics of the ancient Cultivators from just after the fall of the Divine Realm." The Stargazer Master begins to speak, and continues without waiting for an answer, "and the other bridges are recreations made when the Synchroners began exploring beyond the planets they were born on."
In fact, a scholar can't stand even the slightest inconsistency in his explanations.
"What about the people around?" Baha asks again.
And I wait for the Tower Master to respond since this time I have no idea.
"Ancient Cultivators had a number of abilities that although we can recreate with Synchro are fundamentally different, one of which is the ability to pass part of their powers directly to the genes of their descendants, we call this 'Bloodline Talents'. The people represented here are a legendary tribe of 'Eternal Dawn' the Ligverborge whose bloodline talent allowed them to hone various abilities through the light." Could it be that the Stargazer Master founded this place because he has a compulsion to answer everything?
Probably not, but it would be fun if it was.
I look at Baha who is staring at the paintings of these Ligverborges.
"Ligverborg, hidden light."
What the hell does that mean Baha?