Will’s Improvised Class Trial is the first decisive test of Will’s life as a Climber: trapped in the Class Creation Room without the required three Sacrifices, he must turn scraps, equipment, and desperation into a viable Class. The ordeal nearly ends in dehydration and death, but Will’s refusal to accept the Trial’s rules as an automatic sentence produces the Gravity Goat seed, the Uru Drake Primogenitor seed, and ultimately the Resourceful Climber Class. Its significance lies in the way survival, system knowledge, and improvisation become inseparable from his identity.

Causes and Background

The Trial begins under a brutally narrow rule. The Door to The Trial cannot be opened by force, and the only way to avoid dying inside the Class Creation Room is to offer three Sacrifices. Normally, the system prevents this situation by opening the Door when an Aspirant possesses three Sacrifices. Will, however, has only managed to acquire one spirit turtle Sacrifice, paying twenty silver for it—more than half the money he earned from selling a tongue. The purchase leaves him physically ill at the price, but he regards himself as two-thirds of the way toward his goal on the first day.

That calculation proves dangerously optimistic. Will’s satchel contains a Will-o’-wisp Sacrifice and the spirit turtle Sacrifice, but the Door’s other keys are stranded beyond a nonexistent door. He shakes the tattered leather satchel upside down in a vain attempt to make them fall out, only to find several crumbs of pemmican caught in the folds. The system has reduced his escape plan to an inventory problem: two proper Sacrifices are inaccessible, while the only available substitute is food he may soon need to stay alive.

The Improvised Sacrifices

Will first places a thumb-sized piece of pemmican on the Class Trial Altar. A beam of light consumes it, but the system rejects it as a suboptimal Sacrifice and fails to generate a Class Seed. The result establishes that the Altars can process an offering without guaranteeing success; compliance with the ritual is not the same as satisfying its hidden valuation.

With thirst worsening, Will searches for something else that might meet the Altar’s requirements. He uses a piece of leather, reasoning that it has approximately the same mass as an Uru Drake scale. The Altar blazes, the leather disappears, and the system initially announces another suboptimal offering. This time, however, the attempt succeeds after a retry and generates the Gravity Goat seed. The event is an early example of Will treating the system as something that can be tested rather than merely obeyed: mass, material, and probability become tools in a survival experiment.

The final attempt carries a sharper physical cost. Will sacrifices the Uru Drake scale, and the Altar responds with a successful Class Seed generation, producing Uru Drake Primogenitor with 1 Strength, 2 Resistance, 1 Acuity, and 1 Focus, as well as Spacetime and Meta affinities. The system gives him no safe margin. Each failed or uncertain experiment consumes time and resources, while each success determines the range of abilities available to the person who survives the room.

Starvation, Panic, and the Threshold

The Trial’s pressure is not abstract. After thirty-six hours, Will is considering the best way to kill himself because thirst has become severe and the prospect of two more days of agonizing decline appears worse than death. He has no effective means of ending his life, so even suicide becomes another resource problem. Earlier bravado collapses into panic: while Jason Salazar praises William Oh as indomitable and unstoppable, Will paces, hyperventilates, and declares that he is going to die.

The sequence turns the Class Trial into a threshold crossed under mortal coercion rather than heroic ceremony. Will is not selecting a Class from a position of leisure. He is choosing between imperfect possibilities while dehydrated, injured, and trapped. When another Sacrifice attempt finally succeeds, he cries out in victory and immediately passes out. The triumph is therefore inseparable from bodily failure: the system records success at the exact moment Will’s body can no longer sustain conscious celebration.

Choosing the Resourceful Climber

After the Sacrifices produce possible Class Seeds, Will must still choose Primary Abilities suited to completing The Trial. The choice matters because an attractive future Class is useless if its initial abilities cannot get him through the immediate ordeal. He studies the unfamiliar designation Resourceful Climber, noting that he has never heard of a Climber Class and questioning whether the term means a literal climber rather than the general category of people who ascend the Tower.

The system defines a Resourceful Climber as someone who uses any available means to reach the top. The Class emphasizes physical and mental strength, tenacity, and endurance, with bonuses to tools, Meta Relic use, hardiness, and mobility, plus a minor focus in Earth and Spacetime. The description gives formal language to the behavior Will has just displayed: he has survived not by possessing ideal materials, but by converting pemmican crumbs, leather, and a scale into opportunities.

Will selects the Primary Abilities Aspect of the Goat and Phantom Hand. Later system records show him at four of ten Charges with one Free Point and these two abilities established as his Primaries. His choice is therefore both practical and formative. Aspect of the Goat supports the strength and mobility required for climbing, while Phantom Hand directly addresses the loss of his physical left hand. The Class does not erase the amputation; instead, it gives Will a functional, semi-transparent blue hand at the end of his truncated wrist.

Consequences and Significance

Will finalizes the Class after stepping through a glowing yellow portal into sunlight and birdsong, a stark contrast to the sealed room and its dehydration clock. The finalization locks his selections into place, transforming improvised trials into a durable identity. What began as an emergency attempt to avoid death becomes the foundation for his later progression, including the Establishing Quest that sends him against the Kaith supply lines and the subsequent quest to ascend to the 2nd Floor.

The Trial also establishes the governing irony of Will’s advancement. The System presents Class creation as a structured procedure with fixed prompts, Altars, Charges, and success conditions, yet Will survives by exploiting uncertainty within that procedure. He cannot overpower the walls, cannot retrieve the original Sacrifices, and cannot rely on ideal preparation. His advantage comes from interpreting the rules under pressure and making useful objects out of whatever remains.

For that reason, Will’s Improvised Class Trial is more than an origin scene for the Resourceful Climber Class. It is a compact statement of the series’ survival logic. Will is repeatedly forced to choose between immediate bodily needs and long-term advancement, between spending scarce money and preserving it, and between trusting the system’s categories and testing their limits. The Gravity Goat and Uru Drake Primogenitor outcomes are the visible rewards, but the deeper result is the formation of a Climber whose defining resource is the ability to keep acting when the intended path has disappeared.