A few hours had passed.
Lukas sat alone in the lounge, sunk into one of the deep chairs, his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped in front of him.
The room was quiet, and somewhere down the corridor, staff moved about their duties, but none of it reached him here.
His mind wouldn't stop turning.
He'd been thinking about the future. Not the immediate one, not the next hour or the next day, but of the coming years ahead of them.
Since the moment he'd arrived in this world, every decision had been driven by the same thing.
To climb, rank up, and get stronger. Every instinct told him to reach the top of the Tower before anyone else and claim the wish. It had been a straight line in his head, and he'd never once questioned the pace of it.
But there had been Climbers trying for hundreds of years. Even if he delayed for another hundred years, there was no guarantee that someone else would do it before him.
