Chapter 504

Passing through the Tower entrance, pass the various mortal security measures put in place to stop randoms from entering a Tower and getting themselves killed and to stop Climbers from running out with all their ill-gotten gains was becoming tediously typical. Big rooms, long corridors, some interesting architecture sometimes but nothing that would be hung in a medium. Most of these buildings were thrown up with speed being the major factor rather than a hope for being displayed in architectural magazines.

Arthur could not help but wonder what kind of buildings were added to such magazines, if they were egg-shaped buildings, random ovals and twisting corkscrew buildings that were a hazard to live in. Works with amazing ideas that seemed fun to look at but were entirely impractical.

Or perhaps he was wrong, maybe they did care about practicalities as well as visuals. It was not as though he had ever even picked up a magazine for architects in his life. Just seen a few on the racks while he went in to grab orders for people too lazy to make the trip themselves, making deliveries for those who were rich enough or wasteful enough to skip leaving their residences for an hour.

He had envied some of them, that level of materlaism.

Still, he hoped that perhaps they cared about more than the visuals, that they balanced the practicalities of living in a residence along with how it looked on photographs. Too often, the world leaned towards things that looked good rather than the practical. You could see it in martial arts, in the various social media posts and ‘influencers’ who told you to eat at restaurants who then put out food that tasted half as good as what you could find at your local mamak stall.

Rectangular boxes for houses with a little flair on the outside were an industry standard. There was a reason for that, and it was because it was practical and easy to make. Sort of like the cup that he was busy crafting right now, working the potter’s wheel to try to make the clay rise as it spun before him. A small hut, in the middle of nowhere, no one else around him. An individual singularity while everyone else who had come with him had their own challenges ahead of them.

Why pottery rather than something more practical like blacksmithing or armour making or fletching or another half-dozen crafting options that might make him stronger? Not even woodworking, to build furniture or a club.

Practicality was the watch work here.

You could, Arthur had read, learn to throw and make a half-decent cup in a day or two of work. Just constant work, throwing more clay onto the wheel, spinning it up and then when the tower you built to try to center the entire thing came crashing down, starting again.

Wood carving sounded fun, till you realised how long it took to make even a single carving. Blacksmithing might have been a decent start, since the initial challenges were utilizing blanks for the initial crafting options. However, having read up on it, the later stages required one to smelt iron ore and forge from that level. A lot of intense work and learning spent on that, especially getting something semi-decent out of that entire process, with each attempt taking multiple hours.

Leatherworking faced somewhat similar problems, and that became the same issue with armour building if you went down that route. You could learn a lot from the NPCs here, how to forge each of those items, and if you had the time to keep at it, you could pick up skills and abilities that would not be possible in the real world.

There were even Climber specific crafting options. Pills and medicines meant for Climbers to help them grow more powerful, that sped up their cultivation process. Supposedly, some that if you consumed them, could boost your attributes. Not as common here, in the Dakha Tower but in Japan and China, supposedly there were some that were made.

Of course, the other side of the equation was that the pills made by those in the Beginner Towers were terrible for you, could cause troubles if consumed too often and took years to cleanse of your body properly. Intermediate Tower crafters were much better to purchase from, but the subsequent cost of such things was concurrently much higher.

Arthur had no desire to test them, for one thing, he had not the money to purchase them. If there were some that showed up near him or her managed to acquire one from a quest reward – not impossible in this Tower – he might have tested one. He had certain thoughts about how his healing technique might be improved or altered to help cleanse the impurities.

Enough ideas that he would not be opposed to testing it, not enough that he was willing to waste precious funds on the matter.

If anything, the biggest crafting option in this Tower was enchanting. Almost everyone who graduated at the later stages would have to learn some basic enchanting, but it was the dedicated enchanters who started out studying documentation and textbooks before they entered the Tower and were willing to spend years in the Tower repeating the tests who would become the masters.

He neither had the time nor patience to learn that craft.

So, pottery. A valid crafting target, but easy to learn and get vaguely decent at, especially when one had all the attributes of a Climber. It was, rather amusingly, quite easy to get decently good at this as he improved with each new throw.

In a few hours, he was centering and using large clumps of clay, making them rise up and smoothing out edges. Learning about how to keep things from falling over, how to make sure the wet clay was standing. The Tower cheated too, literally telling him so, when he put it in the drying urns, as time sped up within and the clay within dried at accelerated rates while he worked the next set of cups and bowls that would go in.

He only needed to do one, that was good enough for his teacher here to pass him up; but anything he made in excess would be carried on, magically, to his other challenges. A small gift from the Tower, so he took advantage of it.

Throw, shape, dry, trim, paint, dry, paint. One after the other, till the first cup was ready and he passed it on. Not at all stressful, almost meditative in fact.

Why weren’t all Towers like this?