On the seventh floor below I sent the 'Eye of Seth' signals until I found my room, which was in one of the wider spaces of the interspersed walls.
The door is wooden with the profile of two creatures drawn in high relief, an oriental dragon with deer antlers and a mane of leaves and vines, the other creature a wolf with an elongated body like that of a feline with ears as long as those of a rabbit and a forked tail.
I put my hand on the door, and wipe the tear that fell from one of my eyes.
"Seiryuu and Seth" I whisper to myself "Thanks for everything."
It's been a while since I let myself process my emotions, for fear of triggering the 'Eight Demons of the Mind' by accident, but now that I'm here I'll see if there's anything I can do to mitigate that risk.
With my hand still on the door I whisper:
"Turn dust."
And the lock crumbles to dust as if it has been eroded for millennia and I step forward into the room, except for a table at the end of the room and two document shelves one on either side of the room, the place is basically empty.
Behind the table is a large sword hanging on the wall, with an unadorned spear and blue-green wooden bow hanging on either side of the sword. Beside the table was a coat rack on which a polar bear fur cape was hung.
"I think he only moved what was needed, and the rest is up to me."
*********
"Well, I would guide you through the rest of the Tower, but now that Kaz is back I have some things to do with the Tower members, especially the ones who joined after Kaz left so if you'll excuse me." The Stargazer Master speaks and leaps to the center of the stairs and darts to the upper floors of the tower, and of course he had to look respectable while doing this, so he did all this with his hands behind his back.
"He didn't say where we're going to sleep, did he?" I ask Baha.
"No. Now what?" Baha responds still looking at the murals of 'Eternal Dawn' warriors.
"Let's go downstairs and see if we can find Kaz." Now that we're here, it's time to put that damn deal into practice.
"Maybe but how are we going to find him if we don't even know what floor his supposed office is on?" Bah asks.
He didn't really pay attention to the change that awakening the sixth sense brings to a person's perception.
"It's a way of saying, he's more likely to find us with his sixth sense." I answer.
After we had decided what to do, not that we had many options, we started to go down the stairs, step by step unfortunately.
As we pass the floors we see the maps of the other worlds, which I wonder if they are even habitable, we reach the seventh floor.
"Hey, come here you two." Kaz speaks holding a half-open door in one of the rooms we pass.
We do as we are asked and go to the room where he is.
Baha and I scan the room with our eyes, all I can think about is how the hell does the old drunk have so much authority if he doesn't even keep in touch with anyone around here? Another mystery of Kaz, it seems are quite common.
Baha, after taking a quick look around the room, fixes his gaze on the weapons mounted on the wall behind Kaz and the leather cloack nearby.
"What creatures are these?" Baha asks still looking at the weapons.
"The cape is that of a twin-headed polar bear, the bow is made from the bones and sinews of a wooden dragon, the sword is just regular metal except for the jewel in its pommel." Kaz speaks, however his expression betrays his attempt to pass the sword off as 'just metal'.
"Wood Dragon? Never heard of this beast before, how did you hunt it down old man?" I ask.
It's clear by now that Kaz doesn't mind insults, in fact sometimes I wonder if he even cares about anything at all, until I step on a sore spot and he demonstrates that he has things he cares about in fact.
"I didn't hunt him, with the exception of the cape, the other two items behind me were sacrifices and gifts from old friends who are no longer among the living." Remember how I said he's indifferent until I step on a sore spot, I think I just stepped on one.
I try to make contact with his eyes, and I feel a shiver run up my spine, even though they aren't glowing pale blue.
"COFF, cough." Baha lets out one of the most forced coughs I've ever heard "We're already at the tower, now what?"
In fact, I hadn't even thought about that.
I turn to Kaz waiting for an answer.
"Well, as to what to do with you Baha I have no idea." He starts talking "As for you Mingten, start disguising yourself first, I don't want the target on your back to pass to the Tower."
Okay, the disguise part makes sense, I've thought about it several times since my life fell apart, but the constant running didn't even give me time to dye my hair to hide that flashy shade of red.
"The disguise is easy as long as I have a little time but then what?" I ask.
"After? Let's put our agreement into practice, you'll work as my assistant while you hide here and I'll study the techniques you'll teach me." He answers without even thinking about it.
"Eternal Dawn, what would I have to do to get there?" Baha asks suddenly.
"Go to the outermost planet of 'Expanding Horizon' and wait for a cosmic bridge long enough to cross the spatial distortion falling between where you are and the outermost planet of Eternal Dawn." Kaz responds curtly.
"Well, all in all I think it would be a good idea for both of you to take a break from training today both to rest and build up Ki."
He speaks right after the rushed explanation of travel between worlds.
"Okay, there's just one problem. Where are we staying?" I ask the old monster.
"The first underground floor is a residential area, check which rooms you can use and enjoy your stay." He responds in a nonchalant tone, which makes me wonder if he's being ironic about the last part of his reply.
**************
As the brats left the room I began to rummage through the books on the document shelves, looking for a compilation of notes from the latest research I was doing, after going through a row of ten books whose contents can be summarized as: astrophysics of this world.
Most of these books are old Star's test results or loose theories I vaguely remember from my other life. These aren't the ones I'm looking for.
The ones I look for are about my own specialty: pushing the boundaries of the power known as Synchro. And also parallel research into the possibility of things like reincarnation.
I go through three more books, history this time, a summary of the 'Eleven Worlds' and finally find the books that interest me.
'The Nature of the Sixth Sense'
'Expanding Synchro Features'
'Mindstream and Karma, are they related?'
'Streamlining and Compounding'
'Synchro through dimensions'
I call them books because they're elegantly wrapped, but honestly while some pages work cohesively others don't make any sense without proper knowledge, plus there are the notes and scribbles I made to illustrate my rationale.
Rationalizations that in hindsight were at least half the time lucky leaps of logic.
I put the five books on the table, the book on karma directly in front of my chair, the other four stacked on the table, the one on the sixth sense on top of the pile and my stupid idea of using Synchro to traverse dimensions on the bottom of the pile.
I almost burst out laughing, thinking about how deep my despair went, and longing for answers to even think about this thesis, pure bullshit.
I still hunger for answers but, desperation? No more.
Enough of brooding over the past, back to work.
****************
As Kaz had said, the first underground floor is a residential area, so Baha and I went back to said floor, taking the stairs, since neither of us can fly.
When we reach the sixth floor I ask:
"You're wondering if maybe you should go to the place where they found the ruins of the Liverborge, that's why you asked how to get to Eternal Dawn." I speak with a tone of certainty as I wait for a response from Baha.
"Mingten, I wanted to be a merchant before an artist but nobody wanted to take an uneducated twelve year old as an apprentice, but I tried anyway, do you know why?" He responds with a question.
Is this revenge for the times I refused to answer directly? Bastard.
In the middle of the conversation we reached the fifth floor.
"No, and I'm going to assume it's not just because you're an airheaded idiot." As the words came out of my mouth, I realized I'd overreacted, are the old monster's mannerisms getting to me? Damn it.
"Woah, why attack me like that?" Baha says with a face that instead of looking annoyed at the insult, looks at me with concern. Why? "A Synchroner's psychosis is getting worse by any chance?"
Ah, the face of concern was acting then.
Fourth floor.
"Okay, sorry for calling you an idiot. Do you want to continue with your story now?" I speak with my hands raised upwards in surrender.
"Apology accepted, and I do want to end my story." He says with an annoying smile, the kind that says: I won, you lost. Not in a sporting way.
"I was born in a small and isolated village, each time a traveling merchant came with different goods and stories of places I had never seen, my world expanded. As I grew older I wanted this feeling of seeing the world expand, and so when I had the chance to explore the world of course I did, I don't care if it's as an artist or a merchant." He takes a breath as we pass the third floor, and then he continues. "Or Synchroner, so yes, the ligverborges have to do with my interest in Eternal Dawn, but for me they're just what expanded my world even further."
Second floor.
"Well, be careful with that interest the Cult of Gray Flames is held as a state religion on some planets over there." I speak to Baha.
"Well, that sounds like a problem, but it's not like I'm going to Eternal Dawn any time soon, I want to become a decent Synchroner before I go on such a journey." Apparently I really shouldn't have called him an idiot, just an airhead.
And finally we reach the first floor.
In it we go to a counter positioned at one of the smaller intersections, on the counter there was an apparatus similar to a hotel bell, behind the counter a map of the floor with the numbered rooms using the counter as a starting point, and from there counting from left to right.
There is currently no one at the counter.
Baha and I looked at each other, and in that instant we came to the same conclusion.
Pressing the bell to see if someone can help us shouldn't cause any harm, right?