Burt watched as the two women were sent out from the tower and to its gates. He was quite satisfied with their progress, as they served as proof that his tower could work.

Just as a dungeon was intended to do, his tower had strengthened the Ascendants, though it had improved them far beyond what they would likely have been able to achieve with dungeons alone.

Additionally, Burt had seen how access to dungeons was restricted, at least as soon as a dungeon became known, whereas he was the one who could choose who could enter his tower.

Burt liked to feel that he selected those who deserved to receive guidance and learning.

He watched the two women briefly interact with the soldiers, but while only a few days had passed for the world outside the tower, Jackie and Ilene had risen close to the peak of the entire planet. There was simply nothing the soldiers could do as Ilene left them frozen in fear from a burst of bloodlust and the two women simply walked away.

Jackie had been granted an Concept, which meant that she was no longer restricted by biological limitations when it came to healing. Her future progress would depend entirely on her own creativity and determination.

As for Ilene, that woman had only reached the top of the tower in order to protect Jackie. Unless the woman made things much clearer, she was destined to lead a lonely life of longing.

However, the women were out of Burt’s tower, which meant that they could no longer be his concern. He needed to continue with his own domain, and he had so much more that he wanted to do and expand.

For instance, could he guide someone even further along their path? What if he connected entrances to his tower to some of the core’s other planets, introducing more species and creatures to the tower’s occupants?

Really, just what were the limits of what a mortal could achieve?

***

Jackie had no idea what to think of being back in her hometown. She quickly realized that, just the same as how Bren had lived through years in the tower while the village had only gone through a single day, the decades that Jackie had spent in the tower had only been a few days for the village.

It was bizarre to see a place that perfectly matched her childhood memories, despite Jackie’s advanced age. She was struggling to remember the names of many of the villagers, though she quickly realized that it did not matter, as none of them recognized her at all.

Her nervousness mounted as she moved closer to her parents’ home. If not for her status screen, Jackie would have genuinely forgotten how long it had been since she had last laid eyes on her parents: sixty-two years.

To make her nervousness worse, while Jackie understood that her new Concept would allow her to regrow her father’s legs, she had quite literally just received that reward and had no idea how to go about using it. It was just, well, she had finally left the tower, and it only felt right for her to return “home” first, even if she had not felt like she had a home for far too long. How could she have had a home when all of her efforts had been spent on moving onwards?

Her pace slowed the closer they drew to Jackie’s parents’ home. Ilene followed Jackie’s pace, but did give the other woman several questioning glances as they shuffled down the dirt street.

Jackie completely stopped walking once she caught sight of her house. Seeing the little shack she had spent so much of her childhood in was startling after spending decades in the tower. Had it really always been so small? It was clean, sure, but it looked like a good sneeze would destroy the whole thing.

Compared to the peerless, magical architecture of the tower and the structures within it, the village looked small and primitive. The materials were poor and the construction had clearly been done by the locals, rather than professionals.

Ilene opened her mouth multiple times to say something, but held back each time. She had already been an orphan before entering the tower, and had lived in a different region of the province. With her time in the tower, she could not even remember her parents or family, and struggled to understand Jackie’s emotional turmoil. All Ilene knew was that her companion was quite obviously feeling conflicted about returning to the home that she had talked about for years.

As they stood there, a woman stepped out of a house and looked up the street. She was clearly waiting for someone to arrive, and was checking to see if they were arriving.

The woman stared at Jackie and Ilene for a moment, her eyes narrowing in focus. She took a hesitant step forward. “Jackie? Is that you?”

Jackie stiffened up. “Ma?”

The woman started running up the street, calling to her daughter as she ran. For the first time in decades, Jackie was caught up in a tight embrace, though this time, Jackie was taller than the one holding her.

“Bren told us yeh’d be back and that yeh’d be changed as much as her, but I didn’t believe her! It’s just been a week, and yer all grown up! My baby’s a woman…” Sara wept as she held her confused daughter as Ilene awkwardly shifted her feet a bit to the side.

Some time later, Jackie was sitting in her childhood home at the same table where she had been cleaning beans when she had received the notice that she had been granted access to the tower. For her, it felt as though she had traveled back in time, whereas for Sara, she was staring at her grown daughter who had been a mere child less than a fortnight before.

Ilene was still feeling extremely awkward and out of place as she remained at Jackie’s side. The Warrior simply had no idea how to act or behave, let alone what to say to Jackie’s mother.

As morning turned into afternoon and the sun started to move back down, Jackie learned that she had spent only twelve days in the tower, despite sixty-two years passing for her.

After ten days had passed, Bren had made a brief visit to the village, allowed to leave the tower to explain to Sara how Jackie would be changed when she returned, preparing their mother for the transformation that had been brought about by years within the tower.

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According to what Sara had been told by Bren, Bren had been told to make the visit by a system message, and had been transported directly into the village, just a few streets away from Sara and Eli’s home. Sara told Jackie that she had Eli had visited and informed in order to ensure that Jackie’s return would be as pleasant as possible. The stated purpose of the tower was training and education, not to traumatize Ascendants or their families.

Throughout the day, as they waited for Eli and the younger daughters to return home for the evening, Sara almost never let go of Jackie’s hand, practically clinging to her daughter whenever possible.

Jackie never mentioned her goal of restoring her father’s legs, as she still did not really know how to proceed with that task. The tower master had told Jackie that she would be able to do so, but all that she had received had been what her status referred to as a Concept. No new skills or spells had been granted, which told her that she needed to somehow combine her Concept with the spells and skills that she already had and develop something on her own.

The sun was just a bit above the horizon when the three women heard men’s voices approaching. Jackie braced herself to see her father again, and Ilene sucked in a deep breath as she mentally steeled herself for yet another awkward meeting.

***

In an unusual alignment of interests, both Burt and the core kept an eye on Jackie after she left the tower. As the first human to be granted a Concept, both the tower master and the core were curious to see what would happen with the first mortal to receive a Concept.

While core did not care at all about Jackie’s reunion with her family, Burt was happy to see that his little warning to the family apparently helped to smooth out Jackie’s return.

Fortunately, while Burt was typically restricted to his tower and its immediate vicinity, the core had started allowing Burt to observe more and more around the planet in order to select more Aspirants and train more Ascendants.

That was what allowed Burt to watch not only as Jackie reunited with her mother, father, and two younger siblings, both he and the core started to observe every time that Jackie started testing out her new Concept and how it interacted with her skills and spells.

The very first time that Jackie tried to use her most basic Heal spell with her Concept, she found that the spell worked more effectively than ever, but what took her many more tests to figure out was that her Concept followed her intentions. Every time that she hoped or wished for her spells or skills to do something more or different than what they were intended to do, her Concept provided a bit of a boost to Jackie’s abilities.

Little by little, Jackie pushed her abilities beyond anything she had been capable of in the past, and she moved closer and closer to the stage where she would be able to restore her father’s legs.

As Jackie was focused on her Concept and Burt was focused on Jackie and expanding his own selection pool for his tower, the core was paying attention to both of those things while also testing giving other Concepts to mortals in various dungeons.

Different races, genders, and planets received a variety of different Concepts, as the core tested out each and every combination: time, space, life, death, growth, conflict, stability, chaos, order, and destruction were all given to a variety of mortals, though never more than one in each region or planet.

Next, the core considered the possibility of testing out combinations of Concepts with the mortals.

Would they be able to discover anything that the core itself had missed?

***

Angie was the youngest in her family of ten, and was apprenticed to the village shaman. The old woman was the one responsible for healing the sick, delivering babies, predicting the weather for the crops, and foretelling the future.

During her apprenticeship, Angie had seen nothing she could definitively claim to be magic, but there had been so many tricks and information that she had learned that she struggled to believe it.

Predicting the weather from clouds, wind patterns, history, and animal behavior seemed more like magic than an actual spell.

Healing the sick by learning the medicinal properties of almost every plant in the nearby forest was equally impressive.

However, the leading questions and educated guesses that led to “fortune telling” had been incredibly disappointing to the young halfling. She had wanted to learn how to predict the future, not toy with the minds of the other townspeople.

It was only a few days after her first lesson on fortune telling that Angie was sent to the nearby dungeon to collect some of the medicinal plants that Old Carla needed to restock.

It was a rather easy task, as there was nothing too dangerous in the first level of the dungeon, and Angie had gathered the herbs multiple times before, so she was surprised to find that the guardian of the floor had moved away from the passage to the second level of the dungeon.

The walking toadstool was the size of an orc, and all of the halflings in the village had avoided the terrifying fungus ever since it had first appeared all those months ago, after the lightning rabbit had been killed by a team of delvers.

Halflings might enjoy mushrooms, but that did not include mushrooms that were trying to kill halflings.

Angie fled from the massive toadstool, terrified of its growing cloud of spoors that spread out from the monster.

She really was not sure what to do, and her panic was mounting further and further.

The cloud was creeping closer, as was the freakish fungus. Just as the cloud was about to envelop her, Angie scrambled around an outcropping in the wall of the dungeon, only to slip on some of the scree that lay between the sheer wall of the cave and the mushroom-filled forest.

Her little knife for trimming and collecting herbs was still in her hand, and as she fell, the steel struck the flint scree, and a spray of sparks flew out.

The next thing that Angie knew, she was skipping over the ground, narrowly missing multiple tree trunks as she shot through the forest.

She was unable to hear a thing, but the system message in front of her told her all she needed to know, right up until her luck ran out and she slammed into a massive oak.

Several minutes later, she awoke to a pounding headache and a ringing in her ears that drowned out all other noises.

Her vision swam, and she was overcome by a horrible wave of nausea, only for the resulting dry heaves to make the pounding in her head grow so bad that she nearly passed out again.

After taking some deep breaths and trying to calm herself, Angie finally looked at the message box that she had seen right before almost shattering her head on the oak.

You are now level 2.

For overcoming the odds and surviving against a beast that far exceeded your level, you have been granted the following reward:

Concepts:

Order (major)

Time (minor)

The message slowly worked its way through Angie’s mind, though in a slightly scrambled manner.

After several minutes of trying to make sense of the message, Angie finally gasped for breath. Order? Time? The power of time? As in, the future?

Her breath quickened, her headache and nausea all but forgotten.

This was it. Finally, Angie would learn how to do true fortune telling.