After the Rainbow Mage and the Voltar left, it was time to stop putting off returning to the Fire Sanctuary. I’d been doing so because I was dreading both the prospect of not finding any clues about the and actually finding them there.

Only Serayne was able to follow me, of course. At this point, the bracelet that let me call her to my side was finished:

Bronze Grade, Soulbound (Lheticus)

Fire Spell mana cost -2%

Special Active:

By focusing Fire mana into the gem, the wearer may call their Familiar to their side from anywhere in the Cooldown: 1 hour

Special Passive:

The wearer can verbally communicate with their Familiar by speaking into the gem.

I'd put it on my left wrist, so that I could use my right and freely while also using that passive at the same time, if needed. Now, for the first time, I triggered the teleport to the Fire Sanctuary, via a specially added option in a new, or possibly previously hidden subscreen in my Tower Menu.

I had expected to appear in the Core Chamber, but I found myself in the initial room with the hallways that led to the trials. Mostly it looked much the same as before, except for the exact center. Where there had been mostly rubble was now an intact statue—of me. And it was at least twelve feet tall. "Oh."

I called Serayne over, and she gave the statue a good long look too. “It’s been a very long time since the Guardian Golem was last destroyed.”

“Guardian Golem?”

“Yes,” she said, looking a little smug, “the statue is actually an extra measure against Desecrators. If one who wishes to deactivate the Fire Sanctuary passes the trials, they’ll need to overcome it first. It even uses your combat data from your fights here.

"Is that so? Well, I can't deny it's cool that I have a statue of me in here. But of course, that's not what I'm here for."

Serayne nodded. "It's past time you visited the Control Center and the Archive, indeed."

The great door to the Core Chamber was already open. I went through, and once again to the back where the lift was. Serayne followed. She was in her true, phoenix or "Phonixxan" form, which she preferred to be at all possible times, though she had to briefly change to her blue humanoid form when we got in the elevator.

Even without pride in her true species as a factor, I thought her preference was understandable. She looked rather like a little girl in the disguise, but still sounded rather like a haughty lady, so it was as though she was someone afflicted with a particularly young-looking dwarfism. She never spoke out loud in that form exactly because of this situation, which certainly made the best of it—it added to her air of mystery when we were around others who didn't know what she truly was, which did please her, and it was a better excuse than any I could have manufactured to grind spell levels of which was otherwise difficult to train normally.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

At my insistence, we first stopped at the Archive. There, there was another orb like the one to recharge the core, though it was much smaller. It lit up when I tapped it, and within it appeared several dozen pictures of people of various Tower species.

Serayne explained to me how to use the interface—which didn't require much explaining. I just placed both hands on the orb and directed the view to focus on whatever area of the 3D "desktop" with my mind. After a minute of looking, I found a picture that looked like the species that had been the previous Guardian. I mentally clicked on it, and text appeared:

[Guardian of Fire #38, ]

Select Entry

Play All

When I went to "select entry" quite a few more icons appeared. These had titles underneath, but they were all just numbers, counting from 1 onward. "So this is what, a diary?"

"Pretty much," said Serayne, "this is where past Fire Guardians can leave records of themselves. Events that led them to become the Fire Guardian, accounts of what civilization in Area 1 of the Tower is like, advice to their successors, reasons for ascending, for those who do, and in rare cases, accounts of their lives before they arrived in the Tower."

"Hmm..." That got me thinking. It didn't seem like this would contain any obvious clues, but... "How far back in time do these entries go? If I chose the file for the very first Fire Guardian, would those entries be from the earliest days of the Tower?"

Serayne, to my surprise, grimaced. "That's, um, hard to say. The history of Fire Guardians stretches back hundreds of thousands of years, at least. Whether that is near the beginning of the history of the Tower itself, I cannot say."

"Hmm...it's going to take quite some time to go through all this. If only I could download a copy and access it in time-dilated space."

"Go through it all?" Serayne said, "I didn't think you'd be so interested. And I do agree your time would probably be better spent continuing to train for now."

"I thought maybe I could find clues to the origins of the Tower and its purpose," I said, "particularly with what the earliest Guardians had to say."

"So, that's what you're interested in." Serayne's tone had changed dramatically. She seemed deadly serious, and I could almost think wistful? "I still think it's best not to worry about that for the time being. I have a feeling the Sanctuaries will all be restored before your contract with that guild is up. That would probably be a good time to search the Fire Sanctuary Archives, don't you think?"

"Possibly...it's true that I'm very busy between the training, continued liberation missions and preparing to support future Sanctuary Restoration missions."

She was uneasy, though, and I felt her unease. Now was hardly the time to press on such a point, though. "Still, you can prepare log entries yourself in the virtual space," she continued, "and upload them later. I can teach you how, and help you find a compatible data storage method. But for now, I really do think you should check out the Control Center."

"Yeah, that reminds me," I said as I started back toward the elevator, "what does the Control Center control, anyway? It wouldn't make sense to be able to change the trials, or something."

"You'll see~" said Serayne, and once again her voice was in a tone unlike I'd heard from her before.

At first glance, the room with the Control Panel looked almost identical to the Archive room, though it was rather larger. But when I touched what I had now decided to call the Sphere Terminal, instead of a series of pictures as icons, a star map appeared.

What the heck is this? I thought, a thought that I lost the chance to vocalize as words appeared in a position that could reasonably be said to be the "top of the screen":

[Fire Sanctuary Safe Zone Configuration Control]