Nolan awoke to a firm series of slaps in the face.

“What the—Sean, fuck off!”

The man stepped back and gave him a judgemental look. “It’s not my fault you didn’t sober up before you passed out. Because of you, we’re going to be late!” His green robes appeared freshly laundered, and his face was cleanly shaved. His fine hair was damp from recent cleaning, about five centimetres longer than when Nolan had met him.

“Huh?” His head hurt so much that it made him wonder if he had been hit the night before. “What the…” Suddenly nauseous, he snatched the wooden bucket that Sean held in front of him and vomited into it. It quickly became apparent that somebody had recently pissed into the bucket, which made him give another great heave. “How is Ian fine if I’m like this?” He felt terrible enough to want to kick everybody out of the room, snuff out the candles and then empty his stomach into the relief bucket for the rest of the day.

Esteban was giggling by the door, making the zipping-up-the-fly motion. Ian stood at his side with a sly smile on his face. “Haha, this is great. Last night, you gave me some of that wonderful water just before bed. You told me to keep the barrel and then took out another one. Then you drank as much as I’ve ever seen a person drink and passed out. Only, what you took out was a barrel of ordinary water.”

As his friends burst out laughing, Nolan raised his head—which seemed to bear the weight of a mountain—and looked at his bedside to see a pool of water around an overturned cask.

Sean took out his own barrel of energized water along with a tin cup, which he filled and handed over to Nolan.

“Oh my God,” he panted after emptying the cup, having spilled a good deal down his front. “So amazing.” He drank two more cups with zeal, and then let out a loud burp. Not only did the Divine Spirit Fountain water return his sobriety, it completely cleansed the foul taste from his mouth and also filled him with vigour, as if he’d just finished up with a pre-workout warmup. “Wow. That was terrible.” He held his head in his hands. “I’m such a dumbass.”

“Yep,” said Sean. “A dumbass with hardly any time left to get to that meeting point that they mentioned.”

“Come on,” said Ian. “The girls already left. Though everybody’s probably gone by now.”

Nolan threw off the covers and jumped to his feet, quickly summoning his sect uniform and changing out of his pajamas with frantic movements. “Well, you could have not been a douchebag and given me the right water. And you”—he turned to Esteban—“going ahead and pissing in this bucket and then handing it to me. This thing was filled halfway! Are you even human?”

“That was you,” said Sean. “You rose up like a zombie and pissed for like ten minutes. You kept moaning the whole time, it was so disturbing.”

What the hell? He remembered taking three gulps of amberwood ale alongside Ian, in a bet to see who could better handle the high-quality drink. With dozens of barrels of Divine Spirit Fountain water on him and the others, he had been confident that he could win with ease.

I can’t believe I got so drunk that I drank the wrong water and passed out right after. I’m lucky I didn’t puke in my mouth or something.

As he and the others rushed to the meeting spot by the docks, he told himself that he would have to be careful with the amberwood ale in the future. They made it just in time to see May Asten’s beautiful figure disappear from where she had been addressing the crowd from a few dozen metres above the ground. The moment she vanished, the hundred or so disciples of the Falling Rain Sect in attendance began to lead everybody out into the countryside.

Nolan could sense that the girls were at the back of the crowd, which completely dominated the docks and even some of the surrounding streets.

“Wow, we really cut it close, huh?”

Sean stared ahead at the distant disciples. “And whose fault is that?”

As the assembly of participants began to pour out of the city like a human tide, the girls lagged behind so that they could join up with them.

“I’m surprised you’re alive,” laughed Lyra. “You were snoring so loud when we stopped by your room. I can’t believe you drank the wrong water.”

“I can’t either. Now I know why people were losing their shit over that amberwood ale, it’s some serious stuff.”

“You managed to get your hands on some?” said Nyla, raising a thin, dark eyebrow. “I thought they were sold out in the city.”

“Uh, sometimes deals just grab you by surprise.”

“How many did you buy?”

“Don’t worry,” he smiled, digging out a spatial bag that contained ten barrels of the ale. “I got you some.” He tossed it over.

She smiled back, accepting the gift, and the group fell into several modest conversations as they began to follow after the other participants of the tower climb.

After running for about ten minutes or so, they arrived at a long roadway of perfectly polished stone that contained a subtle trace of spiritual energy. It was an impressive twenty paces long, and ran on into the distance for countless kilometres. Nolan wondered if the networks of ancient highways that spider-webbed throughout most of the continent had originally looked so articulate and pristine.

Man, Nyla’s so pretty. He snuck looks at her as they ran along, for the disciples had set a running pace soon after everybody had left the city. Too bad I can’t enjoy it right now. Seriously, why do I feel like a scum? I didn’t do anything wrong last night. He shook his head.

“Something on your mind?” said Avril, who had suddenly fallen into step beside him.

“It’s nothing, just a passing tho—Jesus, how do you keep doing that?” She was only at the third level of Integration, but she was capable of completely sneaking up on him.

“You’re just too easy to get the jump on.”

Lyra lagged behind and snapped at the girl. “Hey, what they hell are you doing here? I told you that I’d give you the slap of your lifetime, but you still show up in front of me. Could you be one of those people that like getting hit?”

“Who knows?”

“Leave her alone, Lyra. She’s the one that gave me that amberwood ale as an apology for earlier.”

“That was you?” Remarkably, the hostility drained from Lyra’s face and she put on a satisfied smile. “It seems you do know the difference between right and wrong. I’ll forgive you this time.”

Avril’s right eye gave a slight twitch, but Nolan shot her a penetrating glare.

“I…hope that we can be friends.”

“That ale is the finest that I’ve ever enjoyed,” said Ian, as he and the others began to draw inward. “You’ve given us siblings each a barrel, so how can we overlook your kindness?”

These boozehounds…

“Nolan, you’re so cheap! You only gave your friends one barrel? I gave you more than thirty!”

“Thirty barrels?” exclaimed Ian. He turned on Nolan, a hurt look in his eyes. “Of amberwood ale?”

Lyra appeared equally wounded, though he could tell that they weren’t entirely serious.

“Stop stirring the pot,” he spat at Avril. “I’m obviously going to share it with everyone.”

As his friends introduced themselves to Avril and vice versa, something stuck out about the older girl that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. After looking closely for a moment, it registered in his mind that she seemed to have lost a substantial amount of weight, and that her skin had taken on a flush of colour. The purple robes that she wore were quite thick, so it had taken a while to notice.

Can people really lose so much weight overnight? Venara was a completely different place than Earth, and operated under an entirely different set of logic and natural laws. Evidently, there existed a method of doing so that he wasn’t aware of.

It took eight hours of steady running to reach the island’s central grasslands, with only a single rest stop along the way. Most of those present were in the Integration stage, and could easily run uninterrupted for an entire day. Even Alicia, Aine, and those at the middle levels of the Profound Entry stage didn’t seem too exhausted by the time that the tower finally came into view.

At first it appeared as a tiny speck of blackness that dotted a little spot in the distance, but it gradually began to grow in size until it dominated Nolan’s vision.

Holy shit, that’s the biggest building I’ve seen since the migration.