Resource Climber Occupation Trial

The Resourceful Climber Trial is the ordeal that converts William Oh from an Aspirant with no recognized Class into a candidate for The Climb. Its decisive challenge is not merely the presence of armed enemies, but the demand that he transform scarcity, terrain, time, and a damaged body into usable advantages. The trial presents climbing as a practical ethic: reach the exit by whatever means remain available, even when direct combat is impossible.

Entry into the Trial

William Oh enters the trial after the Class Creation process has failed to produce a Class Seed from his sacrifice. The system had judged his thumb-sized piece of pemmican a “Suboptimal Sacrifice,” and the attempt ended with nothing to show for it. The failure leaves him trapped, thirsty, and so desperate that, after thirty-six hours, he begins considering suicide because the prospect of dying slowly seems preferable to enduring several more days of agony. Yet the trial offers no convenient means of killing himself, forcing survival to remain his only practical option.

The environment makes the stakes explicit. Sheer cliffs enclose a canyon filled with jagged crags, narrow footholds, and patches of ground overwhelmed by plant life. A system announcement identifies the objective: somewhere in the canyon lies a portal leading back to the Hunting Grounds. The portal is guarded by a hostile tribe of Maksu led by Sezz’kenal, a caravan raider who has developed a taste for human flesh. Returning to the Hunting Grounds will qualify William Oh to join The Climb, so escape is simultaneously a survival task and an initiation into the Tower’s larger order.

Class Definition and Abilities

The trial grants William Oh the opportunity to choose a Class and Primary Abilities, but the system does not make the choice simple. He has only two Charges and one Free Point, insufficient to defeat or bypass an entire camp of Maksu by repeatedly using a mobility effect. Instead of selecting an ability for spectacle, he studies the meaning of the offered Class and tries to infer how its powers may develop.

The Resourceful Climber is defined as someone who uses every available means to reach the top. The Class emphasizes physical and mental strength, but places its greatest weight on tenacity and endurance. Its bonuses concern tools, Meta Relic use, hardiness, and mobility, with a minor focus on Earth and Spacetime. William Oh initially distinguishes this “Climber” from the ordinary meaning of a person who literally climbs, then recognizes that the system is defining a specialized survival role rather than simply naming an activity.

Among the Primary Abilities, Aspect of the Goat provides a group of passive effects centered on mobility and hardiness. It increases resistance to exposure and altitude, allows the bearer to digest food unfit for human consumption, and lets hands and feet find safe purchase even on hostile terrain. Phantom Hand supplies an ethereal hand, a small amount of Dimensional Storage through Charge, and the ability to sacrifice a stored Relic to obtain its effect; it also has an active component costing one Charge. Together, these abilities turn the canyon itself into an instrument of survival and make William Oh’s missing hand less an absolute obstruction than a problem the Class can partially work around.

Reconnaissance and Improvisation

The trial’s central tactical reversal occurs when William Oh sees smoke rising in the distance. The smoke gives him a direction and suggests the presence of an organized settlement, but it does not provide an easy route to freedom. From a vantage point, he sees a village of roughly three hundred Maksu gathered around the portal. They have built a shrine around the entrance and appear to worship it as a divine object; only a faint yellow glow escaping through the badly assembled seams reveals the portal’s presence.

A direct sprint is impossible. The numbers alone make running past the camp and diving through the portal laughable, while the presence of Sezz’kenal creates a second uncertainty: William Oh might have to wait for the leader to leave, perhaps for months, without knowing when such an opportunity will arise. The trial has no time limit, however, and that rule changes waiting from passive delay into a viable weapon. William Oh can remain concealed, live on lizards and cactuses, and observe until the camp exposes a weakness.

It takes three days of watching before the opening appears. A lone Maksu, out hunting, wanders beneath William Oh’s ledge. Rather than attack the camp or spend his scarce Charges on an impractical power, William Oh drops a head-sized rock onto the isolated hunter. The action embodies the Class’s stated logic: the terrain, patience, concealment, and a simple object accomplish what force cannot. His solution is not a heroic charge but an engineered reduction of the problem, turning a fortified mass of enemies into a sequence of manageable risks.

Resource Economy and Survival Logic

The trial establishes William Oh’s broader pattern of decision-making. Before entering it, he has already learned that survival has an exact price. A Spirit Turtle Sacrifice costs twenty silver, more than half of what he earned by selling a tongue, because selling at retail value requires preservation, a shop, and customers willing to pay. He nevertheless stores the sacrifice in his satchel, calculating that he is two-thirds of the way toward his immediate objective on the first day. The trial therefore grows out of an economy in which every object, coin, and Charge must be assigned a purpose.

That logic continues after the trial. William Oh later tracks his Charges as a visible resource, reaching four out of a possible ten, and he evaluates equipment by production and capacity rather than appearance. An Endless Bag of Salt, for example, produces about a quarter cup per Charge, with a maximum of four Charges per day. The same practical attention to inventory and output informs his conduct in the canyon: a power that cannot solve the immediate tactical problem is less valuable than information, patience, or a rock placed at the right moment.

The trial also gives material meaning to the Resourceful Climber’s disability. William Oh is missing a hand, yet he thinks of the canyon as his home turf and asks how he can capitalize on it. Phantom Hand offers compensation, but the decisive adaptation comes from combining ability, terrain, and planning rather than treating restoration of the body as the only path to competence. His survival is consequently framed through accommodation and invention: the environment is hostile, but it is also full of surfaces, elevations, food sources, concealment, and improvised weapons.

Consequences and Significance

The Resourceful Climber Trial changes William Oh’s status from someone excluded by a failed Class-generation attempt into someone with a usable identity inside the Tower’s progression system. Its immediate promise is qualification to join The Climb, while its deeper consequence is the establishment of a method that will recur throughout his advancement: study the rules, count the resources, avoid unnecessary exposure, and exploit whatever the environment places within reach.

The system’s role is equally important. It presents the trial as a formal test with an objective, a named enemy, a defined exit, and a qualification condition, but it does not dictate one approved method of success. The rules create the pressure; William Oh supplies the solution. His Class is therefore not simply a reward for defeating the Maksu. It is a description of the behavior the trial demands and of the kind of climber he is becoming.

The trial’s achievement is modest in appearance but foundational in structure. William Oh does not begin with overwhelming power, abundant money, reliable equipment, or a conventional combat build. He begins with a failed sacrifice, thirst, one hand, two Charges, and a canyon full of enemies. By making those limitations the raw materials of his escape, the Resourceful Climber Trial establishes the book’s characteristic progression: advancement comes not from abundance alone, but from converting constraints into tactics.