Loki sat there for a long time, staring at the glowing piece, until his eyes began to grow heavy despite the fear. He dozed off unintentionally and woke up to cold piercing his bones, and a blue light stronger than what he left.
He rubbed his eyes. The window was there, hanging in front of him as if it had waited for him throughout his sleep.
[Information gathered.]
He moved his head away for a moment, then came back. New words appeared under it, slower than usual, as if the System itself was hesitating.
[Welcome to the Tower of the Great Wizard Reli.]
[A masterpiece its owner dedicated fifty years of his life to building.]
[Climb the Tower. Become the Strongest.]
He read the last sentence three times.
"Tower?" He said in a hoarse voice, and looked around at the narrow stone walls, at the low ceiling, at the darkness that resembled no tower he had seen in his previous life nor in this one. "Where exactly is a tower?"
No one answered.
He got up and felt the wall that had seemed solid moments ago, looking for any change. He found nothing. He walked toward the stone platform where the metal piece had been, and found it had disappeared completely, as if it had never been there at all.
"Great." He muttered. "You took the only glowing thing in this place and left me with a cryptic sentence."
He sat again, this time next to the empty platform, and tried to think clearly despite the hunger that began to gnaw at his stomach again. Fifty years. A great wizard. A tower he can’t see.
"Maybe." He said to himself, trying to give the matter some logic. "Maybe the tower is not a place. Maybe it is this place, in some way I don’t understand yet."
He wasn’t completely convinced by his own theory, but he didn’t have another.
He summoned the window again, hoping for more details. The same two sentences appeared, without addition, without explanation, without a map or hint. As usual, the System doesn’t like to help.
"Can you at least tell me how to start?" He asked in a slightly louder voice.
Silence.
He hit the ground with his fist, then immediately regretted it because his hand still hurt from last night. "Okay. Okay, it’s fine. I’ll figure it out myself, as usual."
He spent the next hour examining the entire room, wall by wall, on his hands and knees sometimes when the ceiling lowered. He didn’t find another door, nor stairs, nor any trace of an actual tower.
He stopped at a far corner, where part of the wall seemed slightly different from the rest, a lighter color, as if it had been rebuilt at a later time. He pushed it with his shoulder. Nothing.
He tried hitting it with the knife. The stone didn’t crack, but the knife slipped and cut his palm.
"Damn it." He gasped, and grabbed his wounded hand with the other.
He sat again, more exhausted than he wanted to admit, and allowed himself to feel, for just one minute, the complete stupidity of his situation. Trapped in a place whose true boundaries he didn’t know, searching for a tower he can’t see, by order of a system that explains nothing.
"If I had known that the last reading I threw away would end up with me here." He said in a faint, almost laughing voice. "I would have at least read it, to know what to expect."
After a while, when he no longer found a wall he hadn’t checked, he returned to the center of the room and sat on the floor where the platform had been. He closed his eyes, not to sleep this time, but because he didn’t know what else to do.
A faint pulse reached him from under the ground, slow and regular, as if something huge had been sleeping under his feet for a long time. He opened his eyes and put his hands on the cold stone.
There was indeed.
"Okay." He whispered, and his heart began to race despite his exhaustion. "Okay, this is something."
He didn’t yet know what this pulse meant, nor how it would get him to a tower that doesn’t appear before his eyes. But for the first time since the door closed behind him, he felt that this place might not be a grave after all.