As Dario’s anger had grown over the years, the memory this time was not contained in a single scene. It skipped over the conversation where his father had explained to them that he had to return to higher floors for important matters, as at the time, he’d felt only confused and not yet furious.

  It began instead with the moment where they said their goodbyes, standing on the edge of the town around the Belt, where the long road of packed dirt to Endanshi began. His mother had been keeping it together well, voice only slightly shaking through the forced smile as she told his father not to forget to write.

  “When are you coming back?” a frowning young Dario asked, arms crossed over his chest.

  “I cannot say,” his father had simply replied, his wild mane of black hair jostling slightly as he shook his head. “Just remember, I do this only because it is important. Because I want to protect you and secure your future. Some day, I hope you will understand.”

  “It’s to do with your research right? When I’m older, I’ll come after you. Then we can research things together,” Matteo had said, eyes set with determination.

  Their father had only smiled in response. “Whatever you decide to do, my sons, I know you’ll make me proud.”

  It didn’t take long for the first bright red smoke to bubble up from his chest. The images shifted to show a dark house with the shutters closed, a young Dario silently moving through the hallway, following the sound of sobbing to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table, head in her hands as she wept.

  It was a punch to the gut for Dario to see the memory so clearly played out like this. A tear rolled down his cheek as sadness washed through the anger, bits of dark blue smoke mixing in with the red.

  He had run up and hugged her from behind, whispering that everything would be alright, that her boys would take care of her. In that moment, he spoke the first real promise he’d ever made.

  “I’ll never make you cry.”

  Bits and pieces of memories flashed on the wall, showing the months after his father’s departure when his mother moved through the house purely on routine, her sad, hollow eyes only lighting up when she knew her sons were watching her. Bits of blue remained, until the images changed and red smoke began to billow out in force.

  The next scene showed Dario as a young adult, not much different from how he looked now, squared up against Matteo who was looking guiltily down at the muddy ground around the Belt, a few of the rickety houses visible nearby with the huge pile of garbage towering in the background. Dario’s fists were clenched as he spoke to his brother.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing this to her,” Dario had said with an angry frown. “Again. Don’t you remember how she was? You’ve called him an asshole countless times. I thought…” His voice cracked and he swallowed, jaw set and eyes hard. “I thought we agreed. To take care of her. And to not fucking make her feel like that again!”

  “That was your promise, Dario, never mine,” Matteo said softly. “You seem to keep forgetting this part, but I always said I’d go find him. But we were just kids back then. It’s not about that anymore. Not for me, anyway.”

  His brother calmly adjusted his glasses as he looked up to meet Dario’s angry eyes. “There’s so much we don’t know about this world. About aura and Ki and the crystal and why things are the way they are. How is it possible that each floor is so different? Haven’t you ever wondered about that? I have all these questions gnawing at me, Dario, and if I don’t at least try to answer them, I think I’ll go mad.”

  “So you’re fine being an asshole then? You’re fine being just like him, as long as you get to do your dumb research?”

  “I don’t think it’s fair to put it all on us. I read this treatise on ethical theory, where the author argued that we should always pursue the most wellbeing for the greatest number of people. I won’t bore you with the details, but a key point of that theory is that you can never put one person’s wellbeing over another’s. If I stay here and drive myself mad, it might improve our mother’s happiness, but it would come at the cost of my own. I know you’re no good at math, but even you should recognize that it simply doesn’t add up.”

  “Easy to say when I’m the one who’ll have to watch her cry again.”

  “Look, I’ll visit-”

  “Oh shut the fuck up, Matteo! You’ll visit!? Really? Just like he was going to write, isn’t it? If you’re gonna go, just fucking go already and spare us the trogshit!”

  There was a large cloud of angry red Ki in front of Dario as his past self stormed off in the memory. It only kept growing as more scenes flashed by of his mother crying at the kitchen table as Dario tried to comfort her.

  “It’s been six months,” she said in between heaving sobs. “He promised to write, to visit. Something must have happened!”

  His knuckles were white and his arms shaking as he squeezed the crystals. The cloud billowed out until it nearly touched the ceiling.

  It was the sound of Nika clearing her throat that finally snapped Dario back into focus for a moment, and he blinked tears away as he began to push the bright red Ki into the crystals. But there was more of it than the crystals could take, and the rage was burning so hot in his chest that he didn’t even notice when the crystals lit up and the door began to slide open.

  Images continued to flicker on the wall and Dario raised his arm, red smoke swirling around it. It formed together into a thick mist and Dario snarled as he slammed his fist down on the obsidian altar with a loud crack. The sliding door came to an abrupt stop as a fissure ran down the black stone, but Dario didn’t even notice, raising his fist again.

  An arm on his shoulder stopped him. He blinked at Nika who was looking at him with a kind smile and he took a step back.

  “Sorry, I- I got a bit lost there for a moment,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand. She shook her head.

  “It would be hypocritical of me to judge, after my earlier lapse. Besides, I do believe becoming enraged was quite the point of this exercise. Well, except perhaps the destruction of the equipment.”

  Dario looked down at the wide crack running down the altar, then at his hand. All of the anger Ki was gone, now.

  “Do you need a moment?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine. I feel… kind of relieved, actually. A bit lighter.”

  “Good. It may be that these strange practices are intended also therapeutically, at least in part. Perhaps to prepare us for something... I expect we will soon find out.”

  The door had come to a stop when he’d smashed the altar, but the gap was wide enough for them to squeeze through. The next room was Nika’s and the word carved into the wall this time was ‘SORROW’.

  The noblewoman only gave a small nod as she read the word, then readied herself in front of the altar.

  What followed was another series of short memories, all of them showing some kind of event, most of which Dario didn’t have any context for. There was an elaborate New Year’s celebration where a young Nika flawlessly executed a coordinated dance routine. Some were parties, others were about some sort of academic achievement. There was something involving a temple, which he didn’t get the point of.

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  But they all had one thing in common: Nika’s mentor, a stiff-legged older lady with kind eyes, telling her that either her mother, her father, or most commonly both of them, could not be there.

  Dark blue motes of smoke leaked from Nika’s chest as young and hopeful eyes scanned the audience, only to be disappointed time and time again. Each memory brought just a bit of Ki with it, so that Dario worried it would never be enough, but there had been so many instances throughout the years that it quickly added up.

  The final push of blue Ki came with a recent memory, a large event to honor the parting of Nika and other young noble sons and daughters as they left on their journey to the Basement, to hunt and integrate a Koto.

  JeeJee had told him of these events for young nobles who’d reached a certain age. A lot of them were born and raised on the third floor, so for them to set off on their own journey was maybe the most important occasion in their young lives. Once they passed down to the Basement, the only way for them to get back home would be to advance and fill the requirements of the first two floors. It was apparently a matter of pride that they shouldn’t be given any help on this journey, so if they failed to advance, they’d be effectively banished from their home.

  Even during that once-in-a-lifetime event, her parents simply weren’t there. The only message she got was her mentor sharing congratulations on her father’s behalf. “He looks forward to welcoming you on the fifth floor,” the woman had said with an excited smile, as if it was some kind of grand honor to some day be welcomed by her own father.

  Dario had always felt like nobles were almost a different species than the likes of him that grew up in a slum like the Belt. They had every privilege and he’d imagined they could just spend their days lounging around and eating grapes if they wanted to. But they were people, too, and they all had problems of their own. His worries were pretty limited to scoring enough hammock time and finding enough artefacts to sell at the market. Nika was under a bit more pressure than that.

  It was also hard to miss that they both dealt with absent parents that were off to do important things. More important, at least, than spending time with their families. He met Nika’s eyes as she stepped away from the altar and gave a small nod and a wry smile. When she nodded back, he felt like they’d reached an understanding of sorts. They'd definitely come to know each other a lot better in the last day.

  They shared a look of excitement as the opened door finally revealed something different: white marble stairs that wound up along a pillar of the same stone.

  “Yes! Please let it be over.”

  After the first bend, they paused to observe simple drawings carved into the walls. The first one showed a person speaking with their hand on their heart. The second showed them closing their eyes, seeming to focus inward, with a few lines that he thought symbolized aura leading into the body. The third and final drawing was a mess of lines that Dario couldn’t make much sense of.

  “This is a diagram for breathing and the channeling of Ki. It details the pattern the cultivator should follow. In this case, circling once through the chest before spiraling multiple times through the seams in the head,” Nika clarified.

  Dario only grunted in reply as he hopped impatiently up the stairs, two treads at a time.

  “Well, well, doesn’t this look promising.”

  He smiled as he took in the large, circular room. There were no windows, but the stone was finely carved, filling the room with flourishes of plants, flowers and heroic depictions of cultivators in battle. There were also recurring carvings of weighted scales and an eye, which were probably symbols of something, but he hadn't a clue what they meant.

  It took him a while to notice the spaced letters right below the ceiling, having to twist his head around to make out the final word: ‘D E S I R E’.

  There was no altar this time, only a slightly raised round platform in the middle of the room, its edge lined with tiny crystals, which he promptly stepped onto.

  “Alright, so what’s the deal here,” he said, thinking aloud. “We’re supposed to be focusing on desire, but there are none of the large crystals to dump the Ki in. There’s also no altar to project our memories, so this one might not be about memories at all.”

  “We should not overlook the drawings along the stairs. It’s possible, even likely, I would say, that they depict what we are meant to do with the Ki that is generated by thinking of our… desires,” Nika said, having come up the stairs.

  Dario nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, makes sense. The first step was to speak right? With our hand on our heart. So we’re supposed to, what, announce our desire to the world?”

  Nika hummed as she strolled around the room, hands clasped behind her back. “The dream must start within our heart. It does seem to fit with speaking one’s true desire.”

  “Alright, I’ll just give it a go then,” Dario said, putting his hand on his heart and loudly clearing his throat. “I want to lounge in my hammock and eat trogmeat and pastries all day!”

  The words, spoken loudly, echoed through the room, but nothing happened. Nika was looking at him through narrowed eyes.

  “What?” Dario said defensively. “I’m a man of humble dreams.”

  “You want to live like an actual farm animal? I have a hard time believing that. Kindly take this seriously.”

  “I mean, trogs lead pretty awesome lives. But fine, let me try something else.”

  He paused, once again clearing his throat and pushing out his chest. “I want to build a great hoard of treasure!”

  “What, not even a little puff of Ki?” he complained when nothing changed. Realizing it was at least going to need the same focus as the previous rooms, he let out a sigh and closed his eyes.

  The memories had been played out visually, so perhaps it would help to now envision the future he wanted. He wanted to relax in his hammock, find nice treasures, maybe go on the odd adventure now and then, as long as it didn’t take him too far away. But for a grand revelation of his inner desires, something like that probably wasn’t enough.

  So he let those dark memories of sadness pass by again for a moment, recalling his mother quietly sobbing in the night. What he truly wanted was the opposite of that. His desired future had to be one where his mother never had to be by herself, tears leaking on the kitchen table.

  So he created another mental image, based on memories of his mother smiling and laughing, the way her eyes lit up when he walked in for their shared dinner. Dario stuck with those images for a moment, letting the warm, almost aching feeling of wanting grow in his stomach.

  “I want my mother to be happy,” he whispered, still keeping his eyes closed. It felt right and true.

  Then he imagined the way his life would likely play out. Settling down would mean finding a nice woman. For some reason, his thoughts turned to Hana and, for the first time, he imagined what she might look like - small but fierce, pale skin with large eyes always full of wonder, stripes of verdant green running through her dark hair. Maybe he’d go find her, then they might settle down and he would… find work? Maybe still selling artefacts from the Belt. Or something else. The details weren’t important.

  He tried to let that feeling of desire for this future grow, but there was a tightness in his stomach that felt like it was getting in the way. Stubbornly, he continued with the fantasy - he’d father children at some point and they’d all have regular dinners with his mother together, her eyes always bright with happiness, the only tears being those of joy. He’d never again have to see her crying form bent over that kitchen table.

  “I want to settle down with a partner,” he whispered, pressing his eyes shut as the tightness in his stomach grew. Even if he never left the Basement, they’d all be happy together. It would be enough. “I want to live a quiet life in the Basement. A family life, a modest but happy one.”

  “Umm, Dario?” Nika said.

  The concern in her voice had him promptly opening his eyes, to see a touch of green Ki drowned out by a dark brown cloud. He frowned - there weren’t supposed to be two colors. The brown Ki felt… wrong, somehow. But then something else drew his eye: the small crystals around the edge of the platform were lighting up in red, one after the other, until they formed a full circle.

  “Huh?”

  A lurch in his stomach as the floor suddenly went out from under him. He let out a scream as he fell, straight down into the darkness, scraping against the wall before sliding down a widening stone tunnel. His momentum slowed only slightly as it evened out and his world turned into flashes of dark stone as he rolled and tumbled down the pass.

  “Urgh,” he grunted breathlessly, the air knocked out of him as he crashed into a pile of rubble. It took him a moment to orient himself, but one look at the ceiling was enough to tell him he was back in the grand hall they’d started from.

  “What the fuck is wrong with that test? Spitting me out like an uncooked grain of rice. Probably doesn’t even fucking work anymore,” he grumbled as he got to his feet.

  Movement caught his eye and he stiffened as he spotted the beast, sitting on top of a broken pillar. A large cat was watching him, black fur partly covered with a mantle of bright red smoke. Now that he was focused, he immediately noticed that there were two more of the cats, strolling in his direction from either flank. His eyes, filling with Ki, paused on their vicious claws and the long canines poking out of their maws.

  “Hey there little kitties,” he said in his sweetest voice. “Are you the sweet and purry kind or more the assholey kind?”

  The closest cat growled, revealing more sharp teeth.

  Dario sighed as he grabbed for his bow and gathered his Ki.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”