Chang-li stumbled through the entrance to the tower. There was a deep rushing sound and a sensation like his head and stomach had swapped places. He was falling, falling. He took a step forward and caught himself, thrusting his arms out for balance.

The rushing sensation subsided. His feet had never left the floor. He stood in a stone path with walls on both sides, open to the sky. The gray stone walls reminded him of the canyon where he had just been, except they were perfectly straight up and down. Under his feet were enormous paving stones, cracked with age. Grass and moss grew up between them. A drift of sand nearly a foot deep piled up nearby. The walls rose over his head, 15 feet or more. The distance between the two walls was about twice the height of a man.

Overhead, the sky stretched like madness.

Chang-li's breath caught in his throat. He stared. The sky overhead was a riotous swirl of colors, all the hues of the rainbow, circling and whirling upward like a slow-moving reverse whirlpool. He felt as though he were going to be pulled up into the sky, to the point directly overhead where the colors merged together into a single glowing white hole. The colors ebbed and flowed: mostly blue, now more green, now more red.

"Where the hell are we?" Joshi's exclamation called Chang-li back to himself. He looked around. Joshi and the Indigo Princess stood just beside him, and behind them was a wall of stone. There was no sign of the opening they’d just come through. Chang-li reached out his hand and brushed it. His fingers found unyielding rock. His clothes were damp but the wall that had been a waterfall a moment before, was completely dry. He pressed against it more intently. He didn't want to go back out of the tower, not yet, not with that monster waiting for him. But here they were, trapped. He made a fist and pounded against the stone.

"There's no way out," he exclaimed.

"You want to go back out there? With that thing waiting for us?" Joshi asked skeptically.

"No, but, I mean, eventually maybe?" Panic rose in Chang-li. The cultivator's journal had said nothing of an entrance that vanished behind with no way to exit. Perhaps they'd never looked. A true cultivator would be focused on climbing upward, not retracing steps.

Chang-li forced himself to take a calming breath. Behind him, the princess cleared her throat.

"Can you explain what happened? Where are we?"

Joshi and Chang-li turned together. The princess stood, hands on her hips, her eyes sparkling. Probably with anger, though perhaps it was excitement. Her damp undergarments clung to her slender frame, leaving little to the imagination. Her damp, dark hair cascaded down her shoulders, reaching past her breasts, framing her odd features. She had almost an oval-shaped face, with narrow, tilted eyes, and an almond shade to her skin Chang-li had never seen before. The divine emperor called his cultivators from all across the empire. No doubt this woman's grandmother had been from far away, and she bore the traces of that unknown land.

“Now,” she repeated, "What is going on? Where are we?"

Chang-li said, “We are inside the first floor of the great cultivator tower, the Tower of the Golden Moon." He felt a swell of pride as he said it aloud. He had found it!

The princess sighed, relief lighting her face. “Very well. Take me to the cultivators. I shall explain how you both assisted in saving my life." She nodded to both Chang-li and Joshi. "And I will refrain from mentioning how you raised hands on my person," she added, addressing Joshi directly. "I realize you were helping me, and that perhaps we had no time for niceties."

"If I hadn't grabbed you when I did, you'd be a dead woman," Joshi said roughly. "Who do you think you are?"

She raised her chin in the air. "I am Indigo Princess Hiroko, daughter of the great general of the West."

Something changed in Joshi’s face, a look of disgust and hatred. "Is that so? Well, I've got some bad news for you, princess. The scribe here is right. It does appear to be the first floor of the cultivation tower. The problem is, the tower has no first floor."

Princess Hiroko blinked. "What? How is that possible?”

"The entrance stone is at the fifth level. There is a known breach on the third floor, which is where most cultivators enter," Chang-li provided. "This entrance hasn't been used in, I think, centuries."

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“That’s impossible! It was just there behind the waterfall?”

"A happy coincidence," Joshi said, “considering the beasts that showed up.”

“Well, not quite coincidence.” He turned to Joshi. "Do you recall those dead cultivators we found while running away on the third floor?"

Joshi frowned. "Yes, I do."

"I found something with them.” There seemed no point in hiding it. They were, as far as Chang-li could tell, trapped here on the first floor. Joshi was strong and had a good head on his shoulders. Chang-li's chances were much better with him as an ally, which meant revealing most of what he knew. "The journal hinted that this entrance still existed. I was planning to find it today. The beasts took me by surprise. I certainly would not have brought companions with me," he added. "I was not prepared for that."

Hiroko was starting to shiver. It was not particularly cold in here, about like a sunny spring day, but there was a bit of a breeze, and her thin, wet garments offered little protection. Chang-li undid his cape and held it out to the princess. She stared at it like it was a dead rat.

"Go on, take it."It may not be your color, but it's warm."

Hiroko reached out with one slender hand and accepted the cape. She wrapped it around her shoulders. A blush of pink crept across her cheeks.

"Thank you." She didn’t lift her eyes. "So you knew this door was here?"

"I hoped it was," Chang-li said.

“And you did not attempt to sell this information for profit?" Joshi asked.

"No.”

“And here we are now, inside the tower. Your book tells you of the way out?"

Chang-li shook his head. "There are a lot of pages I can't read," he admitted. "I know from the bodies that the cultivators reached the third floor where the one with this journal perished. It is likely there is no way out until there."

In the sky, the yellow was beginning to give way to blue, though all seven colors of the rainbow were still represented in the swirls. Joshi stared upward. “The colors feel so much stronger here. Was it like this on the third floor?” he asked urgently.

"What?"

"The lux quantity. Was there so much of it?"

Chang-li shook his head. "I don't know. You were there.” Chang-li opened himself up and began the simplest cycling pattern he knew, trying to get a feel for the lux all around him.

"There is a lot of lux," the princess said in wonder. "The emperor's own tower is nothing like this. There, almost all of the lux is red. Here, it feels more balanced."

"Yes, the colors in the sky say that," Joshi said. "You really noticed nothing on the third floor?"

"No," Chang-li snapped as he tried to cycle. "Anyway, you were there.”

“I was wearing a collar that cut off my capacity to sense and take in lux," Joshi snarled. "You had no such handicap, so I take it to mean you are completely untrained in matters of cultivation."

"Oh, and a slave is," Chang-li snapped back as his cycling technique was disrupted again. He took a deep, calming breath and tried once more. He only had two cycling patterns, one taught by the Acolytes of the Imperial Way to all subjects of the empire, and the other a meditation technique he learned in scribe school.

"I," Joshi said proudly, "was trained by the sacred monks of Hapiru Monastery, masters of an ancient path of cultivation known as the Path of the Closed Hand. And yes, there is a great deal of lux here. I just don't know if that's normal for a tower, or if it's because no one has entered this level in so long."

"It is not what I felt in the Emperor's Tower.” Hiroko stared up the sky wonderingly. Her hands were arrayed just so, with the middle fingers touching her thumbs, held out a little above her waist, and Chang-li guessed she was using a cycling technique of her own. "There's so much blue lux. The Emperor's Tower has almost none. Gathering enough for me to cycle at all was difficult."

Though not a cultivator, Chang-li had studied texts on the scientific principles behind cultivation. The seven colors corresponded to the seven pure colors of light: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Just as red was assigned to the most populous and low-strength Court of the Empire, so red lux, the lux of bodily enhancement, was most common.

After that came orange for weapons, yellow for elemental manipulation, blue, which he was pretty sure was reserved for mental manipulation, green for life, indigo for spatial manipulation, and violet, the forbidden lux, permitted only to the Emperor and his seven prisms. He didn't even know what violet did.

Joshi was suffused with a reddish tinge. Chang-li could feel the lux pouring through him. As he watched, the sores on Joshi's neck began to close up and scab over. The man opened his eyes and smiled. “Fuck the Emperor and all his officials.”

Chang-li blinked at the crude exclamation. He glanced at Hiroko, who didn't even seem to have registered it.

“I will die before I go back now,” Joshi said. “The path lies ahead. Come if you wish.”

"Wait.” Hiroko lowered her hands, clearly nervous. "This is dangerous. Cultivating on one's own, in an unknown tower where we have no idea what we may face."

"We don't have a choice," Chang-li slapped his hand hard against the stone wall behind him. "There's no way back out. Besides, I came here to cultivate, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

The girl stared at him. "Are you mad? There are terrible dangers, and we are not even armed."

Joshi shrugged. "Better to die a free cultivator than live a slave. You can stay here if you wish. If I escape, I'll be sure to tell the guards where you are. Only I won’t,” he added, “because I am never going back to slavery again.” He started off down the stone corridor.

Chang-li set off after him. There was safety in numbers, after all. A moment later, the princess called, "Wait!" and he heard her rushing to catch up.