Monstrous Cultivation

The staircase appeared as he pressed forward.

It was breathtaking, but not in the way you'd expect — not because of its grandeur, but because of what it *was*: a series of bare stone steps hanging suspended in the dimness ahead, with nothing beneath them, rising toward a strikingly geometric triangular platform floating high above in the gloom.

"This is as far as I can take you. Follow the steps up on your own," the friendly senior said.

"Got it. Thanks."

After the senior guardian left, Mo Fan set one careful foot on the nearest step, half expecting it to drop out from under him.

*This feels exactly like Super Mario — step on the wrong platform and the whole thing plummets...*

It didn't. The steps held firm. No matter how hard he stamped, they didn't so much as tremble. He had no idea what force kept them suspended in midair, but there they hung — proud, immovable, answering to nothing.

Reassured, he climbed. The senior had told him that the triangular metal platform up top — roughly the size of a basketball court — counted as the first level. Elemental energy was far richer there, and Mages could cultivate their Star Nebula at a pace far exceeding anything possible outside.

At first, the climb was easy. No trouble at all.

Then, somewhere around the halfway point, something shifted. Mo Fan — the man who could haul a gas canister up five flights of stairs without breaking a sweat — began to feel lightheaded.

He kept climbing. His breathing grew heavy.

"What's going on? Why is my Magical Energy draining?"

It was draining. Steadily. Unmistakably.

He hadn't cast a single spell. Hadn't run a single Control exercise. So why was his Magical Energy bleeding away with every step?

*Forget it. Worry about it later. Get to the top first.*

He pushed harder. The faster he climbed, the faster the drain — until his Fire Element Star Nebula was nearly running dry.

He made it to the platform.

A rich wave of Fire Element energy washed over him the moment he stepped onto it. It swarmed around him like a cloud of tiny living spirits, warm and welcoming, spiraling playfully through the air — some even nudging their way into his Inner World uninvited.

Feeling the surge of energy, Mo Fan dropped straight into Meditation. What greeted him stopped him cold: the cultivation speed here was no slower than what he'd experienced inside the Earth Sacred Spring.

Back then, he'd still been at the basic level, and the Spring had been calibrated for the Basic-to-Intermediate transition. Now he was already Intermediate — and the speed boost was just as staggering.

*If the first floor is already more than twenty times faster than normal, what does the second floor do??*

Twenty times the elemental density. Twenty times the Star Nebula growth rate during Meditation. One hour here was worth an entire day outside.

*Should I try going higher?*

The dean had made it clear: every Mage's visits to the Three-Step Tower were strictly limited. But if each level doubled the elemental density, there was no good reason to stop here.

Second floor — let's go.

Outside the Three-Step Tower, the friendly-looking senior returned to his post.

The other guardian — quieter, more detached — glanced over. "You didn't tell the newcomer again, did you? Every sub-level of stairs you climb, the spatial gravity compounds and forces Magical Energy to drain by another fixed increment."

"Why bother? They'll figure it out on their own." The friendly senior waved it off without a care.

"You should warn newcomers not to push to the second floor unassisted. The spatial gravity stacking on the second floor is more than twice what it is on the first. Ordinary Intermediate-Level Mages run their Magical Energy dry before they're even halfway up. And once Magical Energy runs out, you lose consciousness — no more Meditation, no more Control practice."

"I said nothing. So did you." The senior's expression shifted — something sly flickered behind his eyes. "And honestly — you know how some people are. Full of themselves. Convinced they can handle anything. Even if you warn them off the second floor, they'll try anyway. The Tower's rewards are just too tempting. Every floor you climb doubles the density..."

"That doesn't make it right."

The smile drained from the senior's face, replaced by something darker. "Right?" His voice dropped. "Why does a freshman from the Blue District get to waltz into the Three-Step Tower while we've had to stand guard here for two solid years just to earn a single cultivation session inside?" Resentment and envy bled through every word.

Mo Fan had been a hardcore gamer in his past life.

In any proper game, leveling was slow by design — that was the point. Balance. Longevity. Kill a monster, earn maybe a hundred experience points.

But then came the private servers — the underground knockoffs where one kill netted tens of thousands of experience and your level shot up like a rocket. The first time you played on a private server, the sheer rush was impossible to describe.

The second floor of the Three-Step Tower was *exactly* like that.

Under normal conditions, the Loach Pendant pushed Mo Fan's Star Nebula cultivation speed to roughly 2.5 times baseline. His Stardust cultivation ran at 4 times.

But here on the second floor — elemental density at forty times the outside world — the math came out to a flat hundred times normal speed for Star Nebula. Stardust hit a hundred and sixty times.

The Earth Sacred Spring hadn't even come close.

One day of cultivation here equaled more than three full months of ordinary training.

The Summoning Element Stardust had been the neglected one. Mo Fan had been pouring his effort into Fire Element and Lightning Element Star Nebula for a while, so the Summoning Element had gone without attention — but the moment he turned his focus to it here, it practically burst at the seams with eagerness.

In a single day, the Summoning Element Stardust expanded cleanly and painlessly into a full Star Nebula.

The Control exercises for his Summoning Element Star Chart also accelerated dramatically in this environment. But Control was fundamentally a discipline of repetition, and there was no need to spend this premium time drilling it. He set the newly formed Summoning Element Star Nebula aside and turned back to Lightning and Fire.

Lightning Element and Fire Element breakthroughs — that was the real objective. Grinding levels on a private server before taking the fight back to the main game... that kind of edge didn't come along every day.