“I climbed and climbed, whole minutes, and every landing exactly like the last. At the end there was a place the rest of the floor doesn't even know about.”
The 63-meter staircase is a zigzag tower that repeats piece by piece until it reaches a height the rest of Level 0 doesn't know. Wanderers who have climbed it say it is unlike other staircases and doesn't lead from one floor to another, but to a part nobody can name.
What it looks like
It is the same piece that forms the towers of the Level 0 staircases, repeated twenty-one times, that is, twenty-one flights of three meters adding up to sixty-three. The footprint of the tower is around fourteen meters, so it fits in a normal region. You climb one flight, turn at the landing, climb the next. Everything is the same, and that's why it's hard to know how far you've come.
How to survive
- Count the flights. The monotony makes you lose the thread, and coming back with sixty meters of staircase behind you and your sanity low is a real risk.
- Rest on the landings, the only place to stop with any safety.
- Bring food and Almond Water, because the climb takes minutes, not seconds.
- Don't leave anything behind. If something forces you to come down all at once, there won't be another route.
What people report
Everything that follows comes from scattered accounts.
- Someone swears the tower leads to a plateau with no portal, a place you reach on foot and not through a door or a pit. No two descriptions of what's on it are alike.
- It is said such summits are few, and each one sits sixty-three meters above the floor around it.
- Those who came back say the summit has an identity of its own, and some link it to the Green Hotel and others, to nothing recognizable.
- Some say climbing the tower is the only way to see Level 0 from above, and that what you see doesn't resemble what you walk through.
For the opposite direction, falling instead of climbing, see Pits. For verticality as a whole, The Building and the Descent.