"What is the meaning of this!" Thomas shouted loudly enough to give him a coughing fit. "You aren't happy in the city, so you move out. Then you hold your wedding outside of the city, and only a few months later you become a cleric to a demon. And now you helped found a new damned city where you teach children to follow a demon!" Thomas took a calming breath. "Michelle, do you have any idea what it feels like, to hear of the helpers guild breaking our deal to keep people safe, and then learn that you're to-"

"Quiet!" Michelle shouted in turn, "You are to blame more than me! The Tower spirit, Greto, is a god. I know you feel otherwise, but it has precious resources that everyone wants. You were the one to make a deal with the helpers guild first, so that they could monopolize the entire thing. And after they nearly killed me, my husband and our friend, you blame me for not dying!"

"I… I'm sorry. That wasn't my intention, but even so, you spit in my beliefs. I know you don't like that I sacrifice myself to make the lives of over a hundred thousand people better, but that's no excuse. You are acting to destroy Valeria, and replace her with a 'god' who happily cuts off its own cleric's, your husband's, leg off."

Michelle had had enough. She flared her mana to life, and pushed her uncle out of the empty school building, before smashing the door closed.

"I'll destroy your god myself, if that's what it takes for you to stop this insanity!" She heard her uncle's muffled shout through the door.

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'I've been thinking, what exactly happens when someone dies, and how am I alive after my death?' Oliver asked after he came back from his most recent trip outside the tower. Oliver had brought back the idea of me turning him back to a human before asking about death, only Oliver no longer was so enthusiastic about the idea. I was pretty sure something had happened to him during his trip, but I hadn't asked out of respect.

'Oliver, what do you think I am?' Over the past month, I'd focused on using what I already did to create more floors and the runes that could be found in them, along with improving the previous floors and refining my runes. Oliver had seen me kill various animals, and then bring them back as new semi-organic and inorganic life forms across all the floors. He shouldn't have reason to fear turning back to a human.

'A powerful sorcerer. Why?' was the simple answer I received. It wasn't the first time Oliver had used the word, that being when he'd briefly told me of his death.

'I mean other than that. One day I died, and my soul was left floating with only a fraction of the mana attached to it left. I am direct proof that you won't disappear without a body. It's what happens to everything when they die, and if you figure out how to sense those souls through your mana, you can move them to new bodies.'

'And you are the product of a soul not having a body for long enough for it to learn to live in a new shape, proving that you still remember much of your life. But even so, are you absolutely sure there aren't any repercussions? And I still don't believe what you said to be true, because if it is, shouldn't there have been creatures such as you and that of the city nearby, when I was a human?' Oliver raised a good point. If anything dying could result in something like myself, in the likely billions of years there'd been life on this planet, why would beings like me have existed for such a short time.

'That is true. I guess mana just hasn't existed that long on this planet, and maybe it takes a very long time for a soul to get used to it, so when you lived there hadn't been enough time for my kind to form. Or maybe you're right about there being unknown effects.'

'What's a planet?' Oliver asked, stating in the empty air with one eye, head cocked to the side.

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'You're kidding. You know, this great big sphere that I assume orbits the sun, that traverses the universe at unimaginable speeds,' I wrote genuinely surprised. 'I just realized, it could've been that the planet has relatively recently gone through a mana cloud in space, and grabbed some mana with it. Any souls before that couldn't grow domains.'

'Are you talking about earth? I thought the earth was flat.'

'You really know nothing.' I would have laughed if I could.

'It's not my fault all the sorcerers hoarded their knowledge, and kept everyone else uneducated!'

'So the sorcerers of your time just kept all the secrets to themselves? Wouldn't that just cause everything to be forgotten?' I wrote. Then after a moment, I decided that Oliver was trustworthy, he deserved to know at least some secrets of sorcery. 'Anyways, you need to go to school. What do you want to learn first?'

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With multiple members of the guild climbing the tower and paying their taxes, less time spent in the tower himself, and everyone sharing their findings from the tower, Audrey had decided to spend his days doing research. There were dozens of runes that had some unknown purpose, and it was Audrey who decided to figure them all out, and teach them to those interested.

Over the course of the past months, he'd taught so many people that some had even started calling him a professor, especially after he made sure everyone with the tattoo knew a single rune by heart. The healing rune, which would heal external injuries, but was quite painful on the patient. With more inspection of how the mana moved after it passed the rune, Audrey was relatively sure that it killed flesh throughout the body to heal the injury. Even so, tiny pieces of dead flesh did no harm, especially when compared to bleeding out. It just meant regrowing entire limbs would likely cause death.

Audrey's teachings had grown to the point where each week, Audrey would hold a lesson of all the newest discoveries in runecraft for anyone interested to hear. His lessons had quickly become quite popular, even more so than Michelle's lessons on learning the intricate mana manipulation necessary to form multiple runes simultaneously.

"Here's is a normal plank of wood, with a few runes carved in it, and filled with runedust. It's a basic shield, it stores mana in one rune, which flows to a sensory rune that detects anything in front of it, connected to a logic rune that uses the stored mana to activate a slowing rune. A simple shield that I've shown you before, that needs to be filled at least once a day. But it is thanks to a new rune from the eighth floor of the tower that we can improve on this." Audrey said to the gathered crowd, before drawing said rune on the wooden wall behind him with a charred stick, "This rune compresses the mana you push through it to a single point. As many of you know, the act of compressing mana tugs at the surrounding ambient mana, the same way air gets sucked in your lungs when you take a breath."

Before anyone could raise their hands and ask a question, Audrey excitedly continued, "That alone isn't very useful in a shield. It could easily be used for something else, like creating extremely hot and small flames beyond one's mana manipulation abilities by connecting it to a fire rune. But there's a nice little trick we can do by joining the mana rune with the storage rune." Audrey said, before drawing the said joint rune. "This compresses all of its stored mana into a single point, which in turn tugs on the ambient mana around it, which gets compressed, which tugs on more mana and so on. In other words, this rune gathers ambient mana faster than the shield uses it. Of course it's not very much, and you need to have it at least partially filled for it to work, and stopping enough strikes will use all the stored mana. But the point is, this can fill itself in just a few days without you using a drop of Mana. This wood plank is a shield that could be given to anyone in the world, and they could use it without any skill in mana manipulation."

Soon after ending the lesson, Audrey walked towards Evelyn's new home, every second step landing heavily in the ground. Whilst Audrey and Michelle had enjoyed teaching, Evelyn had continued to climb the tower, scrambling to reach new heights. Michelle did on occasion join her, but for the most part, Evelyn went alone. She enjoyed the thrill, didn't really have anything else to do, and she 'wanted to reach the top' to see what was up there.

Audrey was about to knock on the door, only to hesitate as he saw a mass of about a dozen people walking towards their city. Audrey didn't recognize the man leading the group–though he did recognize the flowing red cleric's robes he wore–but the man behind him was Michelle's uncle, Thomas. Audrey knocked on the door quickly, shouting "Evelyn, I think there's trouble!"

Once Evelyn opened her door, Audrey pointed at the now much closer group of people. It didn't take Evelyn long to notice Priest Thomas moving with the crowd, and not much longer for Audrey and Evelyn to run and fetch Michelle. Both of them had been told of the last encounter the teacher had with her uncle. They knew him coming to the city again couldn't mean anything good.